Jersild: Alice i Eventyrland / Lorentzen: Comics

Album review

This release of two extended works for narrator and orchestra, derived from children's literature and performed in Danish, would seem to have a fairly circumscribed niche market as a target. The music is so delightful, though, and the performances so over the top, that the album might actually even appeal to some non-Danish children (who are old enough to follow the translation), as well as to aficionados of bizarre humor in music, and to avant-gardists susceptible to the charms of the absurd. Jørgen Jersild's Alice in Wonderland, dating from 1950, was written for radio broadcast. Librettist Flemming Geill managed to squeeze quite a lot of Carroll's text into the 40-minute piece, which is underscored almost continuously with Jersild's inventive, witty music that is frequently cinematic in the best possible way, and which has moments of lyrical and profound beauty. Bass Aage Haugland is an absolutely fabulous narrator, creating vivid, sophisticated, wildly funny characterizations for the various creatures Alice encounters on her adventures, and he even sings a little. The performance by Frans Rasmussen and the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra is colorful and dramatic, and the production values, especially the engineering and sound effects, both here and in the Lorentzen, are very high.
Lorentzen's Comics obviously takes Cathy Berberian's Stripsody as a point of departure in its use of extended vocal techniques to convey the loopy humor of comic strips, but his work is far more elaborate. It consists of four dramatic realizations taken from comic strips and children's literature, scored for narrator, orchestra, and a motley crowd of 260 extras whose main functions are to shriek in terror and imitate animals and space aliens. Do not be deceived by the titles; some of these movements have next to nothing, or nothing, to do with their ostensible subject matter. Witness these lines spoken by the heroine of Madeline in Paris: "Good Lord! What a bloodbath! This must be Professor Charon, with a bullet through his head! … Must discover what connection there is between Professor Charon and the giant bat-like monster." The music is extremely inventive and effective as illustration, but until the finale of Flash Gordon, where it really takes off, it doesn't have the substance of Jersild's Alice. Actor Thomas Eje turns in a virtuoso performance as the narrator, deploying an astonishing arsenal of mouth sounds and varied voices. This is the kind of CD that may not leap out as a "must-have," but it demonstrates that modern music can be laugh-out-loud funny, particularly in performances as skilled and expertly produced as these.

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