01	1st Movement/Luminous Galaxy						15:49
	02	2nd Movement/Fjelldapen						11:28
	03	3rd Movement/Escalator						07:22
	04	4th Movement/Toccata						10:44
	05	5th Movement/Lux Aeterna						15:20

Terje Rypdal : guitar
Palle Mikkelborg : trumpet
Iver Kleive : church organ
Еshild Stubo Gundersen : soprano
Bergen Chamber Ensemble
Kjell Seim : conductor
Lux Aeterna,
1st Movement: Luminous Galaxy
2nd Movement: Orchestral Interlude
3rd Movement: Fjelldеpen
4th Movement: Organ Interlude
5th Movement: Lux Aeterna


Highly attractive between-the-idioms album from the veteran ECM improviser/composer, setting his unique electric guitar, Palle Mikkelborg's trumpet, and church organ played by Iver Kleive against the sonorities of the Bergen Chamber Ensemble.

Commissioned by the Molde Festival, "Lux Aeterna" conveys some of the lyricism and freshness of early classics including "Whenever I Seem To Be Far Away" as well as the compositional logic of later works including "Q.E.D". and particularly the acclaimed "Double Concerto" of which classical magazine International Record Review, comparing Rypdal's textures with those of Paert, Tььr and Kancheli, wrote "Rypdal's voice is an individual one, and he has much to say; he is in addition a superb orchestrator...."






Terje Rypdal: Lux Aeterna / review

The Guardian 17/01/2003


Terje Rypdal is the Jan Garbarek of the electric guitar: a musician who makes his instrument sound more like a violin or a pan pipe than the wilder, rougher axe of, say, Jimi Hendrix, one of his early models.

A Norwegian, Rypdal came from a rock background in the 1960s, against the grain of influences from his father, an orchestral conductor. But for the most part, he has explored a spacious, moonlit, depopulated world closer to Garbarek's. Like Garbarek, he has stayed with the ECM label for decades and had a productive early relationship with the jazz composer George Russell. But Rypdal often works with classical orchestras and some of his work is more symphonic (though minimalist) than typically electro-acoustic, improvisational or jazz.

This set was recorded live at the Molde jazz festival in July 2000. It is a five-movement, semi-classical piece featuring Rypdal and three others: trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, with his haunting, secretive, Miles Davis-like sound; a vocal soprano; and Iver Kleive, who, with his fearsome cathedral-organ roar, explores the remarkable mixture of traditional and programmed sounds of the new state-of-the-art organ at Norway's Molde church.

For Rypdal fans or guitar buffs, the contribution of the leader is pretty modest, and the remarkable Mikkelborg is at least as prominent a solo voice. But it is Kleive's organ that provides the real surprises in what is for the most part a familiar Scandinavian new-music scenario of long, slowly exhaling ambient sounds, minimal melodic movement and devotion to the minutiae of texture.

However, the interventions of the soloists frequently make effective contrasts with the surroundings. Mikkelborg releases sudden blizzards of sound over hymnal backdrops early on. Later he soars high against a ghostly shiver of violins, and the hiss of air through his horn is as telling as his fully-formed notes. Rypdal's extraordinarily lyrical guitar, meanwhile, waits until the second movement, rising to a high squeal against the thunder of the organ.

Some of this set produces qualities of sound that are really remarkable, particularly Kleine's unaccompanied passages, in which quiet, doodling episodes suddenly erupt into furious dissonance, then fall back to a filing-into-church murmur. But this disc is not for listeners who get fidgety about ambient music: the set doesn't overly concern itself with memorable melodies, or harmonic movements that go somewhere unexpected, except when the improvisers are playing against them.






"Lux Aeterna" Interview - 2000
Translated from Norwegian by Morten Mordal.
- Interview from smp.no. 13 07. 2000, by Gry Store.

Eternal light at Moldejazz !

The commission work "Lux Aeterna" is Terje Rypdal's first composition that is written especially for a church, at a jazzfestival. The composer is hoping that the work also will sound good.

A middle-ages church in Graz in Austria in July and Oslo Domkirke in August : Church concerts are not new to Terje Rypdal. - "But it is a new experience to write music specially made for a churchroom", he says. - "But I'm not sure that it will sound very different from what I have written earlier. It is very important for me to write the work for Moldejazz, and the concert gives room for much improvisation. Hopefully it will sound nice too" says a laughing Rypdal.

"Lux Aeterna" with the undertitle "Trippelconcert for trumpet, electric guitar and churchorgan" do have premiere during Moldejazz on Wednesday. Iver Kleive and Palle Mikkelborg are soloists on organ and trumpet, Rypdal himself on guitar. Together with Bergen Kammerensemble led by Elise Batnes and Ashild Stubo Gundersen on vocal.

LIGHT AND SOUNDS
Lux Aeterna: eternal light and galaxys of stars.

- "Light experiences is the main idea in the work. My own experiences on the mountains in Tresfjord is also important. The belonging to the nature you can feel in everything I do", says Rypdal.

A childhood experience is coming up in his mind and must be told. A ten year old boy runs away up into the mountains. He follows a sheep path up the 700 meters to the top of Rongja. He runs to the top thinking that his family just can sit there by themself now that he has runaway from them. The wind is blowing up, more and more, Rypdal remembers a very special light and clouds, and the sound of strong wind. The boy got frightened and ran back home. - "I was away for about one and a half hours, but nobody had missed me, and nobody believed the story about that I had been to the top at that short time. I would of course never have a chance to do this today. And it is really a sad story, it is sad not to be believed. That strong experience that I had up in the mountain is the reason that I moved to Tresfjord, where my father came from. And this experience up in that mountain you can still hear in my music today", he says.

IMPROVISATION
But it was the Moldejazz-boss that came up with the idea for Lux Aeterna.

- "The record "Double concert/5th Symphony" was released this spring, but it was performed first time in Trondheim in 1993, and the year after that at the Molde Jazzfestival. Festivalboss Thorstein Granly did enjoy the second movement especially well, and asked me to write something out from this movement for a church concert in Molde", tells Rypdal.

Iver Kleive and Palle Mikkelborg came into the planning for the concert at an early stage. These are two musicans that Rypdal has been working very much together with, and all three of them will have soloparts where they can improvise freely. Bergen Kammerensemble (Chamberorchestra) will fill out and "colour" the music with strings, keyboard and percussion. - "But not too much of it. Lux Aeterna is very melodic. Personally I have become tired of very tight music, that is not my way to make music anymore - others can keep up with that direction. I was at a concert in Molde Domkirke and listened to Mozart's Requiem, to get to know the room and acoustics of the church better. I hope I have got it right, both according to the church and the jazzfestival. "Lux Aeterna" does have more to do with jazz than any other direction, but no one that will come to Molde Domkirke will be disatisfied with what they will hear", says Rypdal.

- Is there any reason that you perform so much in churches these days ?

- "It is really kind of strange. I do not know who is managing these concerts, maybe it is just the thing at the moment, that the churches have opened up for new musical experiences. The churches does have fantastic acoustics that many concerthalls can not compete with", he says.

NEW RECORD
Rypdal likes Moldejazz.

- "The Festival have done very nice things for me, and let me come here often. Festivals can help musicians and help them further ahead with giving them commission works and be able to make something new. Everything will not stand up in World-hystory as something great, but it is important to try something new. Take for example Nils Petter Molvaer, look what happend to him after he did a commission work for Vossajazz some years ago", says Rypdal.

- "Take myself, I do enjoy it much more at jazzfestivals than at plain 'new music' festivals like Ultima (Oslo). Ultima is too intolerant about music they do not like themselves. Some of them mean my music is too commercial and banal. A Oslo newspaper wrote that that my Double Concerto was just crap-music. What do you say to that? I do have my own way for making music, and then people can like it or not", says Rypdal.

Lux Aeterna will also be performed in Bergen after Moldejazz. The plan is to release it on record as well.

- "If 'Lux Aeterna' will not be my next release, then it will be something else. I will certenly make a new record this winter anyway", he says.

- Interview from smp.no. 13 07. 2000, by Gry Store.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terje Rypdal
Lux Aeterna
(ECM)

Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal doesn't do "small-scale". He's a performer of monumental musical aspiration, whether it's in his awesome guitar frenzies, or in his own compositional vision.

His Lux Aeterna is a sort of hour-long vision of nature and light, a five-movement work for three soloists (Rypdal himself, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, organist Iver Kleive), soprano Ashild Stubo Gundersen and the Bergen Chamber Ensemble with conductor Kjell Seim.

The commission came from Norway's Molde Jazz Festival, one of the world's most remarkable hotbeds of music-making, which nurtured the early days of many ECM luminaries and which continues to breathe fire into the newer generations of Nordic jazz. Festival Director Thorstein Granly had wanted something along the same lines as Rypdal's earlier Double Guitar Concerto, with its anguished and lyrical slow movement so hard to get out of the mind.

What Rypdal came up with is an intense personal celebration of nature and light, and of the mountains of his childhood. "This sense of belonging to nature - you can feel it in everything I do". He acknowledges Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and the idea that the eternal light of the title underpins whatever beliefs the listener might hold.

If you're looking for some vintage Rypdal guitar playing you'll find he features only sparingly but the first notes of the trumpet reach for the stars themselves, the high brass colours taking over where the guitar cannot go. The music in the first three movements is reflective, sometimes so gently positive it's almost too good to be true, but then standing by the waterfront in Molde looking across to Rypdal's cathedral of mountains, it's hard to believe anything is wrong with the world at all.

Rypdal in full flight is reserved for the organist in the fourth movement, and afficianados of Rypdal's earlier works will recognise the take-no prisoners approach, disturbing, energising music which resolves in the state of bliss of the final Lux Aeterna itself.

This is music to let flow in the inner reaches of the soul.

Reviewer: Fiona Talkington, presenter of Late Junction on Radio 3