The virtuoso guitar player Magnus Andersson is specialized in contemporary music. He had several pieces written directly for him and as he spent a lot of time in Italy, many Italian composers wrote him music. On this CD Magnus plays a collection of these Italian masterpieces of today by maestri Maderna, Bussotti, Berio, Clementi and Donatoni. You need Real Audio to listen to this file: Bussotti: from RARA Listen to all nosag CDs on the air: "YESS music" with the whole CD-catalogue of nosag records

THE CRITICS:

SEICORDE: CD OF THE MONTH July-September 2002
"It is surprising, experience to listen to these interpretations of Magnus Andersson. Here, from a distance of 20-30 years when the works on the programme were composed, the unsacred tone of provocation typical of the avant-garde seems tempered by his cultivated reflection on the historical thread and tradition that generated them.

The force of the avant-garde is released by the extreme gestural control of the guitarist, which expresses a severe intentionality in which the rigor is a sign of the highest professionalism.

In the ´short sounds´ of the guitar that Donatoni liked so much (hence the title), dense silences are intercalated into whirling musical aphorisms and kaleidoscopic instrumental colours that are here amalgamated into concentrated sonorous emissions of what seems to be essential. The research conducted on sound then becomes primarily a vehicle that indisputably, beyond the intransigence of abstract sonorous architecture, creates that third dimension through which space is given not only for the fantasy and the intellect, but also opens up a window towards horizons of the most refined poetry. Music consisting of fragments finds in these intense interpretations a wonderful coherence and if one listens to it all in one stretch, one becomes completely absorbed into the spirals of an interpretative mind of absolute coherence."

Dagens Nyheter: CRITICS CHOICE: Records of the year 2000
"The salinity of the Mediterranean Sea read in drops of water: Italian post war modernism as an acoustical adventure in concentrate."

DN: "(---) The strange title ´Short Sounds´ hides a view over the contemporary post-war modernismus of Italy (---) We get aquainted with another guitar tradition than that of the blown-up efforts of the electrical guitar to mix with the soundscape of industrialism. (---) This music should be surrounded by total silence. (---) a CD that is an everchanging aucoustical adventure. "

EXPRESSEN: CD of the month April 2002
"If intellectual power can have a sound then the guitarist Magnus Andersson is the man to make it hearable. On his new CD Short Sounds he has collected Italian music of modernism. All is characterised by a longing for Italy that contradicts all follies of Berlusconi."

Morgonavisen, Oslo: " The priorities of Andersson shows that he clearly is a musician in contact with our time. The most striking aspect with his interpretation of Berio’s Sequenza XI, an interpretation that shows many of his individual distinctions as an interpreter, is the combination of an aggressive hardness with very clear articulation. Even in the most furious flamenco-like passages Andersson is always stressing the structure and bodily contours of the music, but without losing energy. This dualism of an active surface and an underlying melancholy is something that can be applied to several of the interpretations on the CD where Andersson’s enormous energy is balanced with an undercurrent of poetry."

The Wire: "Short Sounds reflects Andersson´s enduring relationship with Italian New Music. Berio´s Sequenza XI is an unyielding test piece with sudden splurges of activity disrupting the continuum. It´s hardly the most graceful of pieces, but Andersson forges a performance full of white hot contrasts. His flirtatious fingerwork is completely mesmerising on Donatoni´s playful and more humane Algo."

Sunday Times: "Andersson is a brilliant Swedish guitarist whose bold repertoire is well illustrated by this selection of eight items by five modern Italian composers. The two pieces of Donatoni's Algo are minutely crafted and full of the sforzato gestures giving the disc its title (Donatoni told Andersson, "I don't like long sounds.") For Aldo Clementi's plangent Fantasia on lute fragments by the 16th century Galilei, Andersson uses an 11-string alto guitar, for Maderna's Lorca-inspired Y Después a resonant 10-stringed instrument. He gives a forceful account of Sequenza XI, Berio's take on flamenco, and charming ones of low- and high-lying arrangements of his piano miniature, Brin. Also included is a realization of Bussotti's fanciful Rara."

GUITART: "It is very rare, particularly, in the field of the guitar, to find a Cd that is entirely dedicated to the most radical contemporary music and which is so well executed. Magnus Andersson is a guitarist who has engaged himself in this direction for several years and he has, obviously, acquired knowledge about the practices in new music that enables him to “interpret”, in the “classical” sense of the term, the proposed works on this Cd with admirable knowledge and “bravura”. (---) It is also for this reason that the Cd by Andersson is so courageous: to put at disposal a real instrumental technique, and Andersson has plenty of it, for an aesthetic as well as a repertoire that is not easy to listen to and which is not commercial. (---) This is a Cd of the highest level and it transports our instrument to completely different frequencies. We need interpreters like Magnus Andersson, who occupies themselves with problems of the evolution of language and with a contemporaneity that is a true testimonial to music as a form of thinking."

Gitarr & Luta: "(---) This is the best CD I have heard from Magnus Andersson, his playing has developed much. It has a beautiful design and sounds very well and contains well-written texts by Andersson himself and by the Berio expert David Osmond-Smith. "

SvD: "(---) The guitar player Magnus Andersson you rarely hear playing other than the most difficult of contemporary music. Nothing seem more ungreatful to me than to write contemporary music for guitar. Often you hear instrumentically badly written pieces where the skill of the composer is none and the short sound of the guitar is compensated with hard, sticky bending of string attacs.
These bad habits are rare on this CD. In Berio´s Brin a strange unique lyrisicm is created (---) and equally unexpected and beautiful is the Fantasia by Aldo Clementi (---) an excursion in the renaissance space of Galilei."

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