Nordic Light - Royal Strings

SCANDINAVIA is a strange place. Half the year it barely gets light at all, and then there are those White Nights where it never gets dark. Then there are the Northern Lights, which surely Vincent Van Gogh must have seen before he painted Starry Night St Remy.

It must be very confusing.

Luckily there is nothing at all confusing about Nordic Light the CD, just 70 minutes of rather lovely music.

Maybe it's something about we north Europeans, but Grieg's Preludium, which opens this collection on the Bis label, could easily have been penned by a German or English composer.

This is a fine compilation of Scandinavian music, from the well-known (two works from Grieg's Peer Gynt suite) to the unusual.

Carl Nielsen's Underlige Aftenlufte is just one example of the delicate and often sublime works gathered together here.

Rather than reminding me of fjords, mountains and forests, they actually evoke that smell you only get carried along with a warm summer evening breeze, a peculiarly English thing too. I suppose the word is pastoral.

In a way, Peer Gynt spoils the unexpectedness of this CD.

It's not that Anitra's Dance, for example, is out of place musically, but it jolts the listener because it is something so instantly recognisable in the middle of so much likely to be new and interesting to most people.

The musicianship on this recording is first-class, with the Royal Strings (formed from the string section of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic) being uniformly excellent.

They have a real empathy with the music they are performing just listen to the lyrical pull of Larsson's Romans, or Soderlundh's Folklig vals no 2.

A very rewarding CD.

(Bis-CD-1181)