Dream Play

Program notes

About the Work

Per Nørgård wrote Dream Play in 1975 and revised it in 1980. It belongs to one of the most fertile stretches of his career. For about a decade from the late 1960s he built his music on what he called the infinity series, a melodic rule of his own devising that generates an endless, self-similar line: take every third, fifth or fifteenth note of the series and a new melody appears, and all of them fit together harmonically because they share the same source. The big work of those years was his Third Symphony for choir and orchestra (1972–75). Dream Play came straight out of it, alongside the orchestral piece Twilight and the opera Siddharta, and it shares the Third Symphony’s glowing, overtone-rich sound.

The piece is short, about ten minutes, and scored for a chamber orchestra: pairs of flutes, clarinets, horns, trumpets and trombones, single oboe and bassoon, percussion, piano and celesta, and strings. Nørgård’s own note for it is unusually playful. He describes it as ‘a tournament of the dream’, in which the participants may stand up to one another, but only in order to take pleasure in their differences, not to crush one another. ‘Here, for example, a David and a Goliath can meet to the great pleasure of both parties,’ he wrote. ‘And now and then the participants stop showing off to one another, and instead abandon themselves to the fondest embraces.’

The Danish scholar Ivan Hansen, writing for a Dacapo recording of the work, described it as Nørgård exploring the infinity series’ garden of melodies, rhythms and timbres ‘in a magical, dancing, romantic way’, with a faintly oriental colour. Formally, both he and the composer point the listener to the same thing: the succeeding passages can be heard as a series of variations.

It makes a natural opener for this programme. As a young man Nørgård was fascinated by Sibelius, and his early music carries on the Nordic line of Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, so Dream Play sits comfortably ahead of the Fifth Symphony.

What to Listen For

Think of the piece as a set of variations rather than a story. Listen for the way melodies seem to grow out of one another, sometimes overlapping at different speeds, which is the infinity series at work: the same line heard at several tempos at once. The piano, celesta and percussion add a bell-like glitter to the texture.

Then follow Nørgård’s ‘tournament’. Some passages set strongly contrasting characters against each other, a big brassy idea beside something small and delicate, the David and the Goliath of his note. Other passages melt into warm, consonant harmony, the ‘fondest embraces’. The music is never aggressive for long; conflict here is a game.