Rating:
Genre:
Jazz
Release Date: 04/08/2003
Lux Aeterna is a new five-movement work by composer, guitarist, and improviser
Terje Rypdal who, like his labelmates
Michael Mantler and
Jan Garbarek, has done a great deal to blur the lines between European
jazz and
contemporary classical music.
Rypdal's ensemble, which includes himself on guitar, trumpeter
Palle Mikkelborg, church organist
Iver Kleive, and soprano
Åshild Stubø Gundersen, work live alongside
the Bergen Chamber Ensemble conducted by
Kjell Seim at Domkirke's
Molde Jazz Festival to create a work of stunning beauty, crystalline silences, and time-expanding dynamics. Over the five movements,
Rypdal creates specific harmonic tensions that are resolved with a creative and disciplined use of varying tonalities and durations. In the first movement,
"Luminous Galaxy," the
chamber ensemble and
Gundersen open the piece for nearly four minutes and you begin to take in and feel your way through the lush soundscape;
Mikkelborg enters with a half note, slipping like a fine-edged knife into the heart of the mix. At eight minutes it's just
Mikkelborg and a drone of strings before the ensemble gradually reenters this entirely new sonic world that presents itself as a whole, and the musicians do so almost pastorally before
Kleive's organ announces its solo presence, once again courting the strings to advance into its sonic terrain. Before the first movement is finished, the piece comes full circle just in time to create an entirely new series of landscapes propelled by
Rypdal's guitar. And so it goes. There is nothing remotely cold about this work; it is warm and dark and stunning in its stark presentation that is so deceptively complex. By the time the fifth and title movement commences, the listener has been to many worlds within the sonorous terrains of the heart. The lines blur between
improvisation,
classical music, and
jazz, but also between sound and music and between rhythm and space, as tonal fields and textural planes become refracted in reverse into an awesome whole that extends themes
Rypdal first explored in
Q.E.D. and his double concerto.
Terje Rypdal is making the greatest music of his life.
~Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
;)
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