Fragaria Vesca - Geirr Tveitt: From a Travel Diary (2011)

World premiere recordings of several chamber works by leading 20th-century Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt are performed on a new album “From a Travel Diary” by the highly-regarded ensemble, Fragaria Vesca. The compositions they have chosen include the eight-movement suite of the title, the ballet music “The Household God”, and two septets for strings and wind instruments.

Violinist Tor Johan Bøen is the founder of Fragaria Vesca, an ensemble dedicated to musical performance on original instruments. At the age of 13 he won the Norwegian competition for young violinists, and at 17 he joined the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.

He is noted for his performances of music from the Baroque era to the early 20th century. His research on the music of the Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe has resulted in several recordings, including his critically acclaimed disc of Ysaÿe string trios for Simax (PSC1295).

Few composers surrounded themselves and their work with such aura of mystique and disarray as did Norwegian Geirr Tveitt. Born in 1908, he wrote around 250 pieces before his death in 1981. Sadly a fire at the Tveitt farm in 1970 is said to have destroyed most of his musical manuscripts, although copies of some of these works have surfaced over the last decades. The material for this recording has been painstakingly edited by Tor Johan Bøen, some of it based only on a radio recording.