CHRISTIAN WINTHER CHRISTENSEN (b.1977): A Fall from the Perfect Ground, NIELS ROSING-SCHOW (b.1954): 2 Sonnets de Borges (Helene Gjerris [mezzo]), MORTEN OLSEN (b.1961): Mirages, KLAUS IB JØRGENSEN (b.1967): Moonlit (Marie Kobayashi [mezzo]), IVAR FROUNBERG (b.1950): Prelude-Voyage-Jotunheim.

Description: These works offer a cross-section of the preoccupation with sound in contemporary Danish music. Christensen's piece is delicate and ethereal, the sounds as it were performed on the surface of the instruments, with breath and touch as important as the actual notes. Borges' philosophically questioning poems provide the structured framework for Rosing-Schow's dramatic and concentrated, vocally lyrical settings. Olsen's Mirages consists of six brief sections of ambiguous sound content - barely music at all - which represent the mirages of the title; the much longer seventh movement turns out to contain a fuller and more detailed examination of the material already glimpsed in fragmentary, reflected form. Jørgensen sets a poem by Fernando Pessoa which evokes the moon and a sinister lake (the poem's original title alluded also to the moon's association with werewolves) in a swooping, melismatic monodrama full of nocturnal natural (and unnatural) sounds. Frounberg's depiction of Norwegian landscapes as glimpsed on a journey by car begins with abstract washes of cold) colors, but achieves a more concrete fragmented minimalism in the active middle movement, and a glacial calm in the final section. Ensemble Alternance.