Syv salomonsange (2011)
(Seven Solomon Songs from the opera Sol går op sol går ned)

The work Seven Solomon Songs has a highly unusual genesis, as it was created posthumously with the composer’s blessing. In preparation for an upcoming concert series in 2015, organist Jens E. Christensen and Jakob Bloch Jespersen approached Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen with the proposal to transcribe the Old Solomon’s sections in Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s opera Sun Rises, Sun Sets into a collection of biblical songs for bass and organ.

Pelle replied – at that time in the midst of moving house: “Solomon, organ, bass… perhaps not quite ‘on horseback’… but at the moment a four-in-hand is pulling away with me!… I’ll give it a chance later!” Shortly thereafter Pelle wrote: “Listen here again (later), my head is full of moving and so on these days, but I’ve still thought that it must be quite straightforward to transfer the trombone parts to organ! SO, if you or Jens E. could do it yourselves, then just go for it!”

And again just fifteen minutes later:
“Listen here (even later), I’ll take care of it myself if you think it’s troublesome. But it won’t be until sometime in 2016…”

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen barely made it through the imminent move before illness overtook him, and he died in the summer of 2016. The project was therefore definitively entrusted to Jens E. Christensen and Jakob Bloch Jespersen, who together developed a plan for the overall selection and structure of the posthumous work Seven Solomon Songs. After Jens E. Christensen retired in 2021, the new organist of the Our Saviour’s Church, Peter Navarro-Alonso, took up the baton and began an entirely new arrangement of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s score for bass singer, organ, and bass drum. It is Peter Navarro-Alonso’s arrangement of the work that has been recorded for this release.

The Old Testament texts The Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes have both traditionally been attributed to King Solomon.

In the opera Sun Rises, Sun Sets, which Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, by his own account, worked on for more than 50 years, the two Old Testament books are set against each other, personified by the Young and the Old Solomon, sung respectively by a higher baritone and a darker bass voice, each with their own orchestral accompaniment.

The texts for these sections of the opera originate from a large leather-bound family Bible that Pelle’s mother gave him when he was around 30 years old – namely Frederik V’s Bible, published in Copenhagen by Gottmann Friedrich Kiesel in 1757. The Book of Ecclesiastes in particular left a deep mark on Pelle, who experienced its grinding pessimistic mill as a kind of absurd Beckett-like scenario. Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s selected excerpts from The Book of Ecclesiastes are apparently compiled at his own discretion from a number of verses from chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6, where Gudmundsen-Holmgreen also takes liberties with both wording and spelling. In Seven Solomon Songs the seven selected passages are conceived as a suite – a continuous sequence in which both textual excerpts and musical ideas are developed and return throughout the work.

Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s distinctive musical language permeates the work from start to finish, from the introduction’s grotesquely motionless pessimism, which building toward movement V grows into a bebop-inspired cacophony and is released in the following movement VI, whose repeated meditative melodic lines are a beautiful example of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s more lyrical works. From here the madness takes hold once again, only to collapse back into the pessimistic stasis of the opening.

Intentionally or not, it seems natural to view the Old Solomon as Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s self-portrait, focusing on that particular trait in Pelle’s personality which he himself described as “a failed pessimist”.

Jakob Bloch Jespersen, 2026