Album review: Terje Rypdal, Melodic Warrior (ECM)

A multi-part suite commissioned by the Hilliard Quartet, Melodic Warrior offers a marriage of Terje Rypdal's tense guitar and the Bruckner Orchester Linz under Dennis Russell Davies. Built around Native American texts, it opens with a high-pitched tone and coughing, before a swell of cellos and rumbling percussion herald the Hilliards' entry.

Then Rypdal's guitar appears, wrapped in warm strings, and we're off through a sequence of movements recalling such influences as Ligeti (the monkish vocals of “The Secret File”) and Wild West soundtracks (the galloping guitar and strings of “My Music Reaches to the Sky”). The awed, Wordsworthian tone of the piece is echoed in “And the Sky Was Coloured with Waterfalls and Angels”.

Download: Melodic Warrior; And the Sky Was Coloured with Waterfalls and Angels