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Arne Nordheim - Biography
10/06/2005
Arne Nordheim (b.1931) has been one of the most conspicuous figures in the musical landscape of Norway during the past fifty years, and is recognized as a very successful pathfinder. He has received a large number of prestigious international prizes and honors, and is the tenant of the honorary residence offered by the State to the nation’s most outstanding creative artist. In 1997 he was elected honorary member of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
Nordheim studied organ and piano, music theory, and composition at the Oslo Conservatory during the years 1948-52. He has written works in most genres, but his principal instrument is undeniably the orchestra. His early works, such as Evening Land (1957), Canzona (1960), and Epitaffio (1963), are all inspired by the general European search for new sonorities within the traditional body of instruments; though Epitaffio also boasts taped electrophonics. Nordheim was absorbed by the electro-acoustic medium for a period, during which purely electronic works like Solitaire (1968) alternate with others, in which electrophonic sounds are opposed to percussion or other instruments.
In 1972 Nordheim’s Eco for soprano, two choirs, and orchestra was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize. During the last decades he has composed works on commission from all over the world: Greening (1973) for the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra; the ballet The Tempest (1979) for the Schwetzinger Festival in Germany; the cello concerto Tenebrae (1980) for Mstislav Rostropovich; Aurora (1983) for Electric Phoenix; and Magma (1988) for the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
In 1994 the music drama Draumkvædet (“The Dream Ballad”) was premiered as a part of the official program of the Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games. Three years later his important Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was premiered by Arve Tellefsen and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the same year a commission for the 1000th anniversary of the city of Trondheim, Nidaros Oratorio, was premiered in the Nidaros Cathedral. Arne Nordheim's latest large-scale work being the trombone concerto Fonos, which was premiered by Marius Hesby and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005.
