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/  text by composer Svend Hvidtfeldt-Nielsen
    receiving the 3 years grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2003
  

  You could be tempted to divide the composers of Simon Christensen’s generation
  into two groups: The fierce and the lyrical. Of these, Simon Christensen, unconditionally   belongs to the first group. His music is impetuous, gesticulating, often at a very loud   sound-level.  Abrupt accentuations blend into ambitious movements in an edgy,
  rubbing, inescapable advance.
  If you take a look at the music scores you discover that they are extremely demanding.   Demands that seem impossible to fulfill at first glance, but - when the music is playing -   turn out to be evidently necessary for the music Christensen writes. Because, when it   succeeds, it is spontaneous catching music that behind its often hard appearance
  reveals a poetry of its own, and after hearing it several times you will even discover
  a kind of lyricism inside it.

  Simon Christensen accentuates the limited validity of the initial split into two groups.
  It is artificial. Lyricism is, Christensen shows us, more than gentle sounds.
 
  As Christensen's old teacher Ivar Frounberg once wrote:
  “an obvious great compositional talent, from whom we can expect excellence!”

 

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