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Programme Note

SUITE – from BABETTES FEAST (1987) for violin, viola, cello and piano.

The music for Babettes Feast has a lyrical mood and a melodic simplicity, due to its origin: it is part of the music for “Babettes Feast”, the Oscar winning film (by Gabriel Axel) based on Karen Blixen´s story of two sisters who are members of a very puritan congregation. Under the song-like surface, though, the metrical implications are rather ambiguous, for instance the changes between stressed and unstressed beats forces the ears to perceive a phrase as being on the beat at one moment and off the beat at the next. In this way, the simple lines of innocent pastoral serenity conjure the listener to be lulled into an artificial Paradise which is exactly the mood at the banquet in the central scene of the movie, the Feast itself, miraculously saturated with earthly delights – normally unthinkable for a narrow congregation for from the Big World.
The Suite is based on the music of the soundtrack.
The Pastorale was originally composed in 1987 for string trio.
A string orchestra version of the Pastorale was made in 1988


Per Nørgård (1999)