Poul Rovsing Olsen 100 years
On 4 November 2022, the composer music, ethnomusicologist, critic and teacher Poul Rovsing Olsen would have been 100 years.
As a composer, Poul Rovsing Olsen's (1922-1982) background was in the Danish-French tradition, and his works are typified by clear-cut rhythms, expressive melody lines and colourful tonal effects. As an ethnomusicologist he worked with Arabic and Indian music among others. His works are characterized by an extraordinary combination of elements, which creates an individual sound that is unequalled in Danish music. On Friday 4 November, Poul Rovsing Olsen would have been 100 years.
Composer and ethnomusicologist
He graduated in piano and music theory from the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and in law from Copenhagen University, after which he went to Paris and continued his musical training with the renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger and the famous composer Olivier Messiaen. In parallel with this Rovsing Olsen frequented the Parisian Musée de l’Homme, where he could immerse himself in the music of non-Western peoples; an interest which later in life made Rovsing Olsen an internationally recognized ethnomusicologist who went on research trips to the Persian Gulf, India, Greenland and Egypt. There he studied the local music and song traditions and made recordings of the songs of the pearl divers of Bahrain and the traditional Greenlandic songs.
European modernism meets non-Western traditions
Rovsing Olsen’s list of works comprises 85 opus numbers, including songs, piano pieces, chamber music, orchestral works, ballets and the operas Belisa and Usher. Taken together, this oeuvre constitutes a continuous stylistic development with its origins in the stringent neoclassical way of writing and gradually incorporates sonorities and structural experiences from western modernism as well as non-western musical cultures.
Several of Rovsing Olsen's works are recorded on Dacapo Records. His opera Belisa is a chamber play about eros, love and death, at once tragic and grotesque. The surrealistic aspect of the plot by Spanish poet García Federico Lorcais underscored by dream-like music. In Belisa, elements from the Arab musical tradition and European modernism join hands in a through-composed totality that has come to enjoy a special status in recent Danish music.
The album with Rovsin Olsen's songs demonstrates both Danish and French influencess; the lyrics, however, come from all over Europe, including poems by William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Pär Lagerkvist and more. On the album Piano Concerto and Orchestral Works we hear his dazzling Concerto pour Piano et Orchestre together with the wo major orchestral works by the composer with an unusual internatinal outlook.