Moses Pergament, Volume Two: Songs
The Swedish composer Moses Pergament (1893-1977) — Finnish-born of Lithuanian-Jewish stock — chose the poems he set to music from a wide range of sources: those heard in this first-ever recording of his songs are mostly in Swedish but also in a variety of other languages. They likewise cover the gamut of human emotion, from buoyant folksongs and children’s verses via lyrical expressions of love and loss to stark meditations on suffering and death. Many of Pergament’s poets evoke the natural world in their expression of emotion, but his music never yields to sentimentality: he treats each song as a microcosm, expressed with drama and dignity. Time was when Pergament’s vocal music was performed by singers of the calibre of Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth Söderström and Nicolai Gedda; it is high time it was rediscovered.
Tuuli Lindeberg, soprano
Martin Malmgren, piano
Listen To This Recording:
- A klap hot gegeben der Wint (1909-16/1966) (3:15)
- Zwei Kammern hat das Herz (1911, revised) (1:14)
- Kung Liv och Drottning Död (1915) (4:47)*
Två sånger (1916) (3:30)
- No. 1, Kväll i skogen* (2:35)
- No. 2, Barnet og faaret (0:55)
- Erster Verlust (1916) (2:07)
- Der jungen Hexe Lied (1919, rev. 1966) (2:37)
- Die Quelle der Schmerzen (1921) (2:31)
- Torra trädets klagan (1931) (2:22)
Nyckelpigan och andra visor för barn (1932)
- No. 3, Långt bort i skogen (2:20)
4 lustiga och 4 sorgmodiga folkvisor (1936) (13:55)
- No. 1, Rocken snurrar, lampan brinner (1:08)
- No. 2, Men liljorna de växa upp om våren (2:07)
- No. 3, Jag gick mej ut åt vägen (1:17)
- No. 4, De sporde om skön Särling (2:10)
- No. 5, Skomakarevisan (1:54)
- No. 6, Ge mej hit lite bläck och en penna (2:54)
- No. 7, Säckpipan (0:33)
- No. 8, Nödårsvisan (1:52)
- Vårnatt i Ajalon (1941) (5:04)
Fyra kinesiska sånger (1946) (9:33)
- No. 1, Lyssnande till en nattlig flöjt från Shou-Hsingmuren (2:35)
- No. 2, En suck från en trappa av jade (1:05)
- No. 3, Bitter kärlek (2:17)
- No. 4, Gränslös längtan (3:36)
- Ett är nödvändigt (1950, revised) (4:59)
- L’infidèle (1951) (3:32)
- Sono stanca (1971) (3:38)
- Natten sænker sit mørke Slør (1970) (2:14)
- Vaggvisa (1971) (2:41)
First Recordings
*First Modern Recordings
Keskisuomalainen :
‘In overall character the music is late-Romantic, with a gently modernizing edge; flashes of jazz appear at times, and an exoticized China brings moments of pentatonic colour. Pergament’s musical language animates a wide range of textual sources with refined sensitivity. The spirit of the texts sometimes ignites slowly, sometimes sparkles with richly descriptive force. Short and compact in duration, the songs range from foundational existential poetry to subtly wise children’s ditties. Soprano Tuuli Lindeberg is one of the most significant exponents of our time in both contemporary art music and the Baroque.
Her artistry is evident in a colourfully precise, linguistically fluent and supple emotional expression across the texts’ layered and charged turns. Martin Malmgren’s sensitively intuitive pianism ennobles the musical performance, while his equally thoughtful introductory texts elevate the whole to a high-quality recording.’
—Jari Hoffrén, Keskisuomalainen