The Half-finished Heaven is the fourth ECM album by the Norwegian kantele player, singer and composer Sinikka Langeland, released in 2015. Three of its twelve pieces set poems by the Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, and one of them gives the record its title. The rest is instrumental, a cycle about birds, forest animals and the open sky, written by Langeland for a quartet of kantele, viola, tenor saxophone and percussion.
The idea came from producer Manfred Eicher, who first proposed a solo kantele album with a few songs. As the writing grew, Langeland brought in three musicians she already knew from other settings. Lars Anders Tomter, one of Norway's leading classical violists, had played on her album Maria's Song. Saxophonist Trygve Seim and percussionist Markku Ounaskari were members of her quintet on Starflowers and The Land That Is Not. Langeland plays a 39-string concert kantele, a table harp with a long sustain, and smaller 10- and 15-string folk kanteles used mainly for improvising. The quartet recorded in January 2013 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug at the desk.
Langeland grew up in Finnskogen, the "Forest of the Finns" in eastern Norway, and she has said she wanted to express "the mystery and joy of everyday encounters with animals in the forest". The three songs are sung in the original Swedish, and they frame instrumentals that follow the movement of animals, from rustling undergrowth to wings turning slowly overhead. The White Burden is an early piece from 1978, arranged here for viola and kantele. The Magical Bird is based on a traditional polsdans from Finnskogen. On Caw of the Crane, metallic, abstract textures give way to a pulsing episode for the viola. The English versions of the poems credited in the booklet are by Robin Fulton, from his translation of Tranströmer's New Collected Poems.
Writing in The Guardian, John Fordham heard "Seim's soft outbreaths pulsing through the tenor against Ounaskari's deep, sepulchral booms", and noted how modern the themes often sound for music rooted in folk forms. In the Independent on Sunday, Phil Johnson compared the bell-like sound of the kantele to the tintinnabulation of Arvo Pärt, and concluded that "it's the trance-like instrumentals that compel repeated listening".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2377, first released on 6 February 2015.
