Herman Vogt: Cello and Piano concerto

The Norwegian Radio Orchestra Releases Herman Vogt's Captivating Cello and Piano Concertos

The Norwegian Radio Orchestra is proud to announce the release of Herman Vogt: Cello and Piano Concerto, a showcase of contemporary Norwegian composition at its finest. This album, featuring two striking works by composer Herman Vogt, highlights his intricate interplay of soloist and orchestra, offering listeners an immersive musical experience.

The Cello Concerto, performed by cellist Audun Sandvik, is a deeply emotive work, rich in tonal exploration and lyrical depth. Vogt’s mastery shines in this piece as he balances the cello’s expressive voice with the dynamic power of the orchestra.

The Piano Concerto, featuring Sveinung Bjelland as the soloist, is equally captivating. This work seamlessly integrates virtuosic piano passages with sweeping orchestral textures, creating a vibrant and intricate soundscape that pushes the boundaries of modern concerto writing.

Both concertos are brought to life under the baton of the esteemed conductor Anna-Maria Helsing, leading the Norwegian Radio Orchestra with precision and sensitivity. The performances capture the essence of Vogt’s artistic vision, presenting music that is at once innovative and profoundly resonant.

Herman Vogt, a celebrated voice in contemporary Norwegian music, has crafted works that resonate with emotional intensity and intellectual depth. This album cements his place as a leading composer in the Nordic contemporary music scene.

Herman Vogt's work extends a line of artistic thinking established in the Romantic period. His music presents an emotional but formally disciplined response to the central questions of existence, grappling with the very problem of the place of the individual in the world that occupied the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann and Gustav Mahler. Much of Vogt's music follows the established rubric of Classical Romanticism but dresses it in a modern but often tonal sound, both sensitive and stringent. His music's duality echoes fundamental philosophical dilemmas that have always remained with us, pitting the veiled and vague against the distinct and clear.

Vogt was born in Drammen in central-southern Norway. He studied composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music (where he also studied violin) with Lasse Thoresen, Olav Anton Thommessen, Henrik Hellstenius and Bjørn Kruse and at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague with Martijn Padding and Louis Andriessen. His music has been performed by the Oslo orchestras and new music ensembles, and by many more besides.

Vogt's scores often harbour great drama and energy. In 2015, the composer completed a Violin Concerto that took its lead from Beethoven's own work in the form, and explored the dialectical interplay between soloist and orchestra. As he examined and probed concerto form, Vogt began to think of the solo concerto as a form 'in which the orchestra is regarded in relation to a soloist and must therefore constantly assume varying roles.'

Vogt's Cello Concerto was commissioned by the soloist on this recording, cellist Audun Sandvik. An initial version was completed in 2014, but the composer returned to it later, completing a new version in 2022 that replaced the final movement and added a second movement. In this final form, the piece was first performed by Sandvik and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK) in April 2023.

The Cello Concerto is a large-scale piece in three movements, but a work that combines broad, shifting landscapes and expressionistic tendencies with a certain intimacy. Throughout it, we hear Vogt mining a wide sound palette from the orchestra. In the first movement, titled Fantasia, the soloist emerges serenely as if from within an equally placid orchestra, but works its way into various states of agitation induced by outbursts from the tutti ensemble imbued with fantastical instrumentation and a beguiling harmonic spectrum - particularly so in the straining final pages of the movement that follow the cadenza from the soloist, itself initiated on a pizzicato and accompanied by percussion, timpani and harp.

The second movement is a lyrical Canzona marked 'largo e tranquillo' (slow and tranquil). Its long, lyrical lines are based on a simple melody of two adjacent notes but the music moves from its exalted state to a frenzied one in its central section.

The third movement, in sonata form, is altogether more brittle. It is characterized by highly effective interplay between orchestra and soloist, who constantly provide one another with musical fuel while also appearing in opposition - a singular being versus a diverse community (a snapshot of Vogt's view of concerto form). The cello can appear agitated in this movement, scurrying around in search of shelter through heavy orchestral weather, an extension of Vogt's desire to contrast the solo instrument's long, lyrical lines with more technically demanding sections whose complexity suggests something more transcendental. The invigorating harmonic transitions in this movement are particularly noteworthy, even as rendered by an orchestra used mostly traditionally. The cello strives to ascend through much of the movement, its upward scales eventually leading to a sense of resignation. But the concerto ends on an energizing throttle-surge of optimism.

Vogt's piano concerto was written between 2017 and 2021 as the culmination of the composer's cycle of three concertante works including those for cello and violin. The work represents a conscious effort on behalf of the composer to search for a new musical clarity and give fresh voice to classical ideals. The score's neoclassicism is underpinned most obviously by its scoring, modeled on that for Mozart's piano concertos but with added percussion manned by two players.

Immediately in the first movement, listeners will surely sense they are in a different harmonic space in this concerto - one also influenced by Vogt's retrospective glance at Mozart, as much of the harmonic argument is built using triads. The music twists, scissors and clambers its way up through triads, though a feeling of unease appears to pull it back down again. Beguilingly spelt and orchestrated chords hold the music in the air like a cloud, while gleaming pillars of brass appear like punctuation. Underneath all that is a sort of blurred sonata form in which the exposition and development are intermingled and the recapitulation is but a fleeing reminiscence, itself preceding a fiery cadenza-like passage for the soloist.

The concerto's middle movement is slow as in the cello concerto but less direct and more guarded, like an improvisatory idyll in which time stands still until, around two thirds in, a brass call heralds change. What Vogt describes as the music's 'peaceful soreness' presents a direct contrast to the mobility of the outer movements, the finale being characterized by an initial moto perpetuo built of pointillist gestures from trumpet and percussion which quickly induces the sense of a chase in which orchestra and soloist are on one another's tail. The chase calms for a slow central section for strings in which the piano is absent until it offers up a series of marbled chords in the manner of cadenza. When the chase ensues, it does so in a more developed light: more hindered, less fluent, those pillars of brass back again to complicate the music's flow. Echoing the closing bars of the cello concerto, this piece also ends on an upward surge.

— Andrew Mellor

Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence — Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press)