Swedish composer Magnus Granberg has been fine-tuning and developing his deliciously rustic music since he founded his Skogen ensemble back in 2005, persistently sharpening and stratifying his aesthetic. This new work joins a chunk of predecessors that have drawn material—rhythmic, harmonic, titular—from baroque and folk traditions, but Granberg always finds peculiar or hyper-specific ideas in those muddied appropriations that in no way rely on essential qualities of his inspirations. This powerful new recording features music written for a dynamic new Stockholm ensemble called Tya, which presents a sextet account of “Night Will Fade and Fall Apart.” The title scrambles a line from the standard “My Foolish Heart,” which also provided the harmonic material, while rhythmic notions are borrowed from music by Medieval composer Solage. The second disc features several solo readings as well as a piano-vibraphone version of the same piece. The composer adds specific directions for these smaller versions, and that accommodation affords endless variety. While each performance takes on a unique character, Granberg’s aesthetic qualities shine through; leisurely, contemplative, fragile, homemade, and elegant, his melodies spill out through shifting voices in the ensemble version, a gentle percolation of percussion, piano, guitar, and vibraphone producing an elusive sound threaded by long shadowy harmonic string tones while the various solo readings adhere to just one aspect. Stunning.

Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily: The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp, August 2022

The musicians of Ensemble Grizzana are arranged in the usual way for their concert at St Paul’s Hall in Huddersfield. Another player, the percussionist Dmitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, sits among them. The table beside her holds a small and rather beaten-up zither and a tray of the kind of objects you might find at the back of a spare kitchen drawer: two filter baskets from stove-top espresso machines, a tea-strainer, letter opener, a cog, a nut and bolt. Visitors to Huddersfield’s annual contemporary music festival, now in its 40th edition, are used to eccentricity. The presence of such a tray on the Wigmore Hall stage would raise eyebrows well beyond their usual range, but here it’s pretty much business as usual. The effect is unusual, however, in one respect: the wonderful contribution these everyday objects make to the music. Indeed, I would defy anyone with a functioning pair of ears and a reasonably open mind (the two often amount to the same) to listen to the resulting piece of music — How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights (2017) by the Swedish composer Magnus Granberg — and not be won over by the sheer beauty of it. We are used to thinking of beauty as something that somehow perfectly fits our taste, and which as a result answers to our individuality. But there’s another and arguably more profound kind of beauty that attaches itself to the simple experience of attending to things and letting them be. It’s as true when we find ourselves enchanted by a baby or child as when we are caught up in the act of looking at a painting by Memling or Cézanne, and comes just as well, if with a little more effort, from stopping to take in the look of a randomly settled pebble, or to listen to the long grass soughing in the breeze, or being arrested by the sight of a hovering kestrel. The beauty comes from simply being caught up in the raw presence of something else. In Granberg’s piece, after an extended introductory silence, the musicians make quiet, singular gestures. The tray of objects, which are ‘sounded’ by being placed on the amplified zither and made to resonate with an electronic ‘bow’, produce flatter sounds than the traditional instruments, which has the effect of giving the whole musical texture the feel of discrete splashes of sound, like the isolated drops of rain that precede the moment when it actually rains. The splashes accumulate — a slowly bowed cello note here, a note from the clarinet there, so quiet it barely cuts through the breath — gradually creating ripples that push into each other so that, with supreme gentleness, an aspect of something beneath the surface begins to dawn. Suddenly, there it is, perceptible in slights of rhythm, harmony and disposition, the wonderful song that William Byrd set to Philip Sidney’s brief lyric. Like its partner piece in the concert — Late Silence (2017), by the Swiss clarinettist and composer Jürg Frey, which does with Ockeghem’s motet Déploration sur la mort de Binchois what Granberg’s does with the Byrd — the music does not set or adapt its ancient source so much as allow it to be glimpsed. In that sense, the older pieces simply provide an image that coheres the whole, though without eclipsing its parts. The music is not something whose argument you follow or whose external and internal references you pursue. It’s less than that, but also more: a world in miniature, a magical place to be.

Guy Dammann, The Spectator

The festival’s final afternoon featured work that reminded me of Oliveros but was far more refreshing. Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey both took inspiration from early music, atomising pieces by Byrd and Ockeghem respectively, but producing radical results. In Granberg’s How Vain Are All our Frail Delights? (2017), the players of the Ensemble Grizzana set off along separate paths, interpreting gobbets of musical material in their own way. Emerging into a 40-minute crystalline silence were rustles from the zither, electronically magnified breaths from the flautist, a gentle buffing of the cello strings. For the second time that weekend, there were tuned glasses of water. In Frey’s Late Silence (2017), the ensemble pulled simple, quiet two-note phrases from the hush, calling and replying to one another, leading and holding back, before warm harmonies emerged as several instruments took up a single note and let it fade away. Despite the sparseness of the material, it felt purposeful and secure, in contrast with Oliveros’s fussy obfuscation. The result was meditative, questioning, universal, spiritual. It actually sounded like fragments echoing down the centuries. ★★★★★

Josh Spero, Financial Times