For a classical music recitalist, focusing almost exclusively on contemporary, experimental material requires multiple forms of courage. Most obvious among the challenges is the fact that new works are rarely as crowd-pleasing as the vintage hits. And there are additional dangers to be navigated: When presenting cutting-edge works that might seek to subvert the audience’s understanding of an instrument, a soloist risks allowing listeners to come away thinking that the playing isn’t all that impressive.
Violinist Karin Hellqvist doesn’t just brave these roiling waters. She seems to enjoy being submerged in them. She’s secure in her art, and doesn’t need an audience to be constantly thinking about her virtuosity. On Flock, her first album-length recording as a solo artist, Hellqvist takes her time before showing off her chops. But when the fast, arpeggiated patterns of composer Henrik Strindberg’s “Femte strängen” (“The Fifth String”) finally appear, as the third track on this daring, engaging record, they merely confirm a fact that close listeners will have already identified—namely, that Hellqvist is a player of substantial gifts.
One of those gifts is a subtle feel for bow pressure. During “Femte strängen”—a piece that has some of the profound, minimalist calm of Arvo Pärt’s music—Hellqvist resists the temptation to join fast-flowing riffs with more dramatically forceful sound production. The result is a kind of airy, pensive calm, even during the more animated passages. By showing this kind of restraint, the violinist makes sure that when a composition gear-shifts into a new level of dynamic intensity, the change really smacks you in the face.
That ability to make even minute variations in intensity register as big events underlies the first two tracks on Flock. Both Carola Bauckholt’s “Doppelbelichtung” (“Double Exposure”) and Jan Martin Smørda’s “flock foam fume” are texture-first compositions. This is electroacoustic music heavily influenced by early musique concrete, using field recordings of birds (in the first case) and layers of pre-recorded sound (in the second) to create delicate forms of drama. Some of the scraping textures might tempt you to ask, “Is this even violin playing?”
The short answer is, sure—though this isn’t contemporary classical music you can put on while cooking. You probably shouldn’t even try to listen on earbuds; any ambient sound from your environment that intrudes into these pieces has the power to cover up some fine detail. Yet despite the hothouse-flower delicacy of these soundscapes, they reward close attention, thanks in part to Hellqvist’s sensitivity as a player.
The track that closes the album—“Sagittarius A*,” by Natasha Barrett—is decidedly the highlight. Barrett is an international star in the niche contemporary-music circuit of “spatialized sound.” (Think surround sound, squared, with dozens of channels of sound refracted in high-density speaker arrays, around an audience.) While she’s a specialist when it comes to using newfangled programs to disperse and spin sound in ultra-high-tech environments, she’s also just a flat-out interesting composer—a trait that comes across well in a two-channel stereo recording of this extended work.
Over its 29-minute span, the piece has something like a three-act structure. Seemingly beginning in the middle of things, with a pleasing ambiguity regarding which parts are live violin and which pre-recorded, the first third of the work rests in a simmering state of near-quiet that Hellqvist clearly enjoys. But there are stark shifts to be relished throughout, as Barrett’s electronic designs put on a master class of their own: harmonizing with Hellqvist, contributing bell-like chimes, and playing with spatial perception. Though the causes of all these sonic fluctuations are sometimes hard to parse, the pace and intensity are not difficult to understand at all, with emotional effects not unlike those found in other relentless styles of music. That it can all transpire in a relatively hushed environment is merely a testament to the skills of both Barrett and Hellqvist.
Around the 10-minute mark, we start to hear intimations of rising conflict—particularly when a droning background pattern of electronically adapted violin suddenly flowers into white noise. The last third of the work represents a relaxing or unwinding. But for all that broadly understandable structure, “Sagittarius A*” eludes pat understandings. It’s an experience worth taking, multiple times, without trying to conscript it into association with other things you’ve heard before. Who knows—in a few decades, it could even be a crowd favorite.
