Faroese Chamber Concert Tuesday, September the 6th

Atli Kárason Petersen

Atli Kárason Petersen has written for symphony orchestra and brass band. Most of his work, however, has been short chamber pieces.

Born in Copenhagen in 1963, Petersen went to the Faroe Islands four years later. But he studied music in Iceland, where he earned his music education certificate in 1988 in Revkjavik.

Blásarakvintett

Atli Petersen composed his wind quintet especially for the 1991 St. Magnus Festival in Orkney. Faroese works were presented at the festival in a special concert arrangement.

Pauli Í Sandagerði

Pauli Í Sandagerði, born in the Faroe Islands in 1955, is a science teacher. His musical education was built up a bit at a time under various teachers over the past 30 years. He started out playing the piano, but as time went on his work with choirs and composing overtook this. And it is as a composer that he is best known today.

Sandagerði has written for a range of genres - folk songs, rock, lieder, choir music, sonatas, oratorios, piano pieces and chamber music in a modern classical form. Song writing is his major passion, however.

The Faroese have always been a people who sing, and Sandagerði has been choir master for several excellent choruses on the islands.

Kari Bæk

Kari Bæk (b. 1950), who directs the choir in Vestmanna, Faroe Islands, has written several choral works. Fantasia is one of his first instrumental compositions.

HUGLEIDINGAR

Hugleibingar (Fantasia) was inspired by the "melody lines and tones" of the starry sky as seen in January from the Faroe Islands (if you can see it, otherwise you have to imagine it). HugleiUngar was originally performed at the 1994 Summartonar festival.

Kristian Blak

Kristian Blak has written for symphony orchestra and for chamber, choral, and improvisa-tional groups. His music is often performed with visual art, poetry, and theater. For the past few years, Blak has mainly composed for chamber groups and symphony orchestra.

Blak, who was born in Denmark in 19-4 and educated at the Institute of Musicology at Aarhus University, has lived most of his life in the Faroe Islands.

His recent compositions include an epic ballet, Haifa Retur mid FMnborjj^ a flute concerto, a clarinet concerto, and string quartets. In his works, Blak combines inspiration from ethnic music witli traditional as well as new compositional techniques.

STJØRNUR (Constellations)

Stjørnur was written for wind quartet and has two movements: Andante Espressivo and Allegro Energico. The first movement has the character of a romance, while the second is a scherzo carried by a restless rhythmic figure. Stjørnur was originally performed at the Summartonar festival in 1994.

Edvard Nyholm Debess

Edvard Nyholm Debess's musical career began when he played bass guitar in rock bands. At the age of 22 he traveled to Denmark to learn the building trade, but continued to play music with other native Faroese who were there.

Debess (b. i960) took up the double bass and a study of classical music when he returned home in 1988. A year later, he joined the Faroese Symphony Orchestra.

Through the years, he has played and written jazz music, and often jammed with visiting foreign musicians. Debcsss main works are Glottin (Break in the Clouds), written in 1991 for brass quintet, and Summarregn (Summer Rain), composed in 1992 for string quintet.

Frosty Autumn Night

Debess personifies the struggle between summer and autumn in his Frost)'Autumn Night. " I am trying to capture the feelings I have when summer is gone and autumn is well on its way," the composer says about the first movement of his woodwind quintet. Autumn days can mirror the clear sunny days of summer, or portend the battering of winter storms. Debess says of the second movement: 'And then suddenly one night it gets very quiet and frosty cold, and you can see all the stars in the clear sky. You can actually feel the silence. This is the first frost night of the year - winter has come again!"

The Boreas Wind Quintet

The Boreas wind quintet was formed in [988, while its members were attending The Royal Danish Academy of Music. Since then, all five musicians have made their marks as soloists and in chamber and orchestral settings, in Denmark as well as abroad.

In addition to a busy concert schedule, Boreas has toured in and out of the country, performing on television and radio in Denmark and other countries.

To further develop its interplay, the quintet in 1992 studied with the legendary bassoonist and wind quintet specialist Mordechai Rechtman, whose arrangements of the great chamber works of music history now form part of Boreas's repertoire.

Boreas is a young, ambitious quintet working with a diverse repertoire that includes works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Danzi, Nielsen, Barber, Hindemith and Henze.

The quintet records on the Helikon label.