The music of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen is at its most affecting when it is at its most absurd – as in the sinfonietta works on this recording by the composer’s longtime artistic accomplice Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen. The points of departure for the classically absurd PGH pieces on this album range from a red Skoda door, given to the composer by Athelas as a gift (Traffic), over randomly picked newspaper articles (Three Songs to Texts by Politiken) to general inspiration from Samuel Beckett (Repriser and Rerepriser) and Søren Kierkegaard (Og).

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen was one of the most striking composers from northern Europe over the past half century – a unique personality and a major figure in Danish musical life, even though he considered himself to be an outsider.

He was born in 1932 and had his debut as a composer in 1955. In his early works, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen was inspired by such figures as Nielsen, Bartók and Stravinsky. Around 1960, he became a leading figure within ‘the new simplicity’: laconic music which nevertheless, in Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s hands, could be extremely ambiguous. Equivocality and a provocative absurdity are recurrent features of his production. As he himself formulated it: ‘I often write music that cannot make up its mind, and that is deliberate.’

The material in Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music was often extremely restricted. Motifs and sound elements are repeated and displayed without mercy, since confrontation for him was artistically speaking the salt of life. This led both to violent clashes and to completely static, eventless modes of expression.