AXEL BORUP-JORGENSEN  

Axel Borup-Jrgensen was born in Hjrring. Denmark, in 1924, but the family emigrated to Sweden in 1927. After taking his university entrance exam in Linkping and doing his national service, he returned to Denmark where, from 1946 on, he trained as a piano teacher at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He also attended courses in instrumentation with Poul Schierbeck and Jrgen Jersild. Apart from this he is a self-taught composer.

The Swedish cultural milieu, which was open earlier than the Danish to atonal Central European Modernism, was a decisive factor in the development of Borup-Jrgensen's lyrical-expressionist style. In 1959 and again in 1962, he was one of the first Danes to visit the holiday courses in Darmstadt, where the postwar avant-garde exchanged views and experiences. No less important, though, was his interest in modern poetry in Swedish. Personally, he thinks he has learnt more about the new understanding of form by reading poetry than by studying modem music. Finally, the experience of nature in Sweden, with which he has maintained close contacts, has been a major source of inspiration that has left its unmistakable mark on his idea of sound.

Despite his stylistic point of departure in Darmstadt modernism, Borup-Jrgensen does not compose constructivistically, but intuitively, with the emphasis on lightly flowing prose rhythms and fine subtleties of harmony and timbre. His music is often delicate, sometimes bordering on silence, and his extreme care with derail has mainly produced intimate mood pictures in miniature and for small ensembles. Orchestral works are relatively rare in his oeuvre, and, characteristically, all those recorded here are nature scenes: the experience of light, colour, movement, temperature and above all mood, reproduced in a play of sound that evokes states rather than events.