condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (light edge wear)

Close to an hour of some of the most demanding and quietly extraordinary guitar music the twentieth century produced, played by the artist for whom it was conceived. Gunnar Berg (1909-1989) - Swiss-born of Danish parents, formed in Paris under Arthur Honegger, drawn into the orbit of Messiaen and the post-war European avant-garde, eventually the first Danish composer to write a fully serial work - spent the latter portion of his career in a kind of productive exile, recognized in Sweden before he was recognized in Denmark, conducting his creative life at a remove from the institutional centers of new music.

The encounter with guitarist Maria Kämmerling in 1976 proved catalytic. Berg had always refused to write for the guitar, citing Berlioz on the impossibility of composing for an instrument one doesn't play. Kämmerling dismantled that resistance, and what followed - Fresques I-IV (1976-78) - is one of the most concentrated bodies of work in the modern guitar repertoire. Quarter-tones deployed not as effect but as structural material; combinations of harmonics not previously heard in the literature; a spectrum of dynamics and articulation so extreme that the instrument seems, at moments, to exceed itself. Kämmerling recorded the work in May 1979 at Fruering Kirke, and the result is a testimony to what a single, deeply committed partnership between composer and interpreter can yield.

Nearly fifty years on, Berg's music - still not widely performed - retains every measure of its strangeness. This recording remains the essential entry point. Paula Records, Paula 9.