Mona Spigseth: Piano
Øra Fonogram

Mona Spigseth's solo album debut has been a long time coming. In the decades leading up to it, the pianist, hailing from Sør-Odal in Hedmark, has played a central part in Norway's classical music and education scenes as a teacher and performer. She's performed in Trondheim and at festivals in northern Norway, and appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras. In featuring compositions written for her by Henning Sommerro and Bertil Palmar Johansen, Piano, recorded at Trondheim's Øra studio in the spring of 2019, is a culmination of her musical travels and the relationships she's enjoyed with the two composers. Helping to distinguish the release is the fact that it combines solo performances with two works pairing Spigseth with TrondheimSolistene (Trondheim Soloists), an acclaimed ensemble of string players whose discography lists more than twenty recordings.

Speaking of travels, the album opens with a ten-episode travelogue called Vegen, Pianovariasjoner Over Sangen "E Slåttatæja” (The Road, piano variations over the song “E Slåttatæja”). Spigseth herself proposed the idea of variations being written over a melody Sommerro composed in 1976 for a poem by Hans Hyldbakk, the result this thirteen-and-a-half minute excursion. After the pretty main theme is stated, it's embellished dramatically in treatments that are by turns playful, ruminative, theatrical, delicate, and graceful, Sommerro's melody a consistently audible seed from which the material grows. One variation exudes a Bach-like air, another stentorian grandeur, and all grant the pianist a stellar showcase.

Five Johansen settings follow, four song-length and the last a fifteen-minute concerto for piano and string orchestra. Drawing from Munch's painting The Dance of Life, Danse I Måneskinn (Dancing in the Moonlight) is rousing and animated, driven as it is by rollicking rhythm patterns. Johansen evokes dark blues in the Nordic sky in I En Blå Sirkel (In a Blue Circle), the music dreamily Impressionistic and the tone melancholy. In keeping with its title, Rolig Sjø I Dag (Calm Sea Today) is tranquil, its drift mirroring the wandering thoughts of someone gazing upon still waters on a peaceful day.

Reflecting the composer's interest in brain physiology, Noe Om Å Finne Veien (Something About Finding Your Way) uses the pianist's hands as analogues for synapse firings between brain cells, the outcome a lively exercise that sees scurrying patterns alternately uniting and criss-crossing. That interest carries over into Hippocampus Variations, Concerto For Piano And String Orchestra, with Johansen embroidering the electrical impulses sent from one brain cell to another into a considerably more elaborate statement. With Spigseth joined by TrondheimSolistene, the piece is sonically rich and, reminiscent of Sommerro's Vegen, wide-ranging too in its oscillations between measured control and agitation. Whereas pizzicato plucks enhance her pensive pianisms in one section, luscious strings envelop the keyboard elsewhere.

Sommerro bookends the recording with Triquarta, a concertino for piano and orchestra, a more formally structured work than Hippocampus Variations that exploits strong contrasts between its movements. “Drama & Flirt” is as flirtatious and playful as expected, its impact strengthened by a bold cadenza; “Romance” likewise confirms expectations with its warm expressions and serene tone, while “Toccata” reestablishes the rhythmic vitality of the first movement with stabbing string flourishes and splashes of piano chords.

December 2020