This is certainly also the case in Ståle Kleiberg's opera-oratorio "David and Bathsheba", where form and content embody the multi-layered complexity that makes up a great work of art. Yet the music is highly communicative, speaking to a broad audience in a direct and immediate way.
From the opening bars, Kleiberg's music establishes a very particular orchestral and harmonic colour, one effect of which is to ’place’ the events beyond our reach. It would be trivial to describe this distancing of the action as a mode of exoticism, but there is nonetheless a whiff of the East about the tone of the work, evocative of the time and a distant place. This is anything but a retreat into some oneiric fantasy world, removed from our contemporary reality. Rather the remoteness of the setting, together with Kleiberg's non-naturalistic approach to the drama, gives the work something of the character of myth. This enables it to speak to us as all myths speak to us, of deeper truths.
The present recording is a successor of 2L's Grammy-nominated release from 2009, Treble and Bass: Concertos by Ståle Kleiberg. Like the previous disc, the present one has been made in close cooperation with the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, this time conducted by Estonian maestro Tõnu Kaljuste.
