from Fifty Folk Tunes from Hardanger Op.150 (1953)

No.28 Mountain Call

No.7 The Crown Bride

No.33 Tears and Laughter for a Boat

No.41 Stave Church Chant

No.1 Welcome with Honour

While it would be going too far to describe Geirr Tveitt as Norway’s Béla Bartók - obviously, the two composers cannot be compared in terms of overall achievement or international reputation - they do have at least one significant thing in common. Like Bartók, Tveitt was a tireless collector of folk tunes, which obsessed him to such an extent that he not only made arrangements of many of them but also absorbed their idiom into his own. Unlike Bartók, however, he did not deposit his collections in libraries and made little effort to get his own compositions published - with, as it happened, disastrous results. In 1970 a fire at his family’s ancestral home near the Hardanger fjord, where he had been collecting folk tunes for thirty years, destroyed no fewer than eight cupboards of manuscripts. Having lost what has been estimated as eighty per cent of his work, he died eleven years later a broken man.

It is clear from the music that did survive - the small proportion that was in print or had been recorded - that Tveitt the composer was no primitive. He had, in fact, studied in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna and by his early fifties had put together an enormous catalogue of compositions, including two ballets, five Piano Concertos and a Hardanger Fiddle Concerto. He was also a virtuoso pianist, touring his own (and others’) works throughout Europe during the post-war years and acquiring a particularly appreciative audience in Paris - where his version of impressionism, which co-existed with the increasingly Nordic element in his style, must have had a special appeal.

His folk-song arrangements are not primitive either. They are highly sophisticated in the sense that the folk material is conscientiously presented in its own modes, a subject of which Tveitt made an intensive study. Since very few of the Hardanger tunes are in major or minor keys they should not, he felt, be dressed up in the romantic harmonies applied by a previous generation of Norwegian composers, Grieg included. Bartók was of the same opinion, of course, which explains why so many of the Fifty Folk-Tunes from Hardanger Op.150 - which was distributed in a private facsimile edition in 1953 and so survived the fire - sound a little like Bartók. The melody of the first piece in the present selection, Mountain Call, shares a modal identity with some of Bartók’s folk tunes, although Tveitt’s treatment of it, with its subtly suggested spare mountain atmosphere and its characteristically Norwegian decorative figuration, is entirely his own.

Without resorting to conventional keyboard devices, Tveitt writes most effectively for piano in these arrangements, not least in The Crown Bride, with its forcefully rhythmic, even percussive use of the left hand contrasting with the bell-like sonorities high in the right hand in the middle section. Tears and Laughter for a Boat is a particularly impressive example of Tveitt’s piano writing, beginning almost as Bartók might have done with the same tune and never compromising either the rhythmic or harmonic character of the original before the unexpectedly reflective ending. The material of Stave Church Chant so fascinated Tveitt that he had two goes at it, both of them accumulating a tolling sonority before gently fading out. Perhaps the most interesting of all the arrangements is the first, Welcome with Honour, which is a poetically effective indication of how whole-tone impressionism can be combined with Hardanger modality without incongruity.