Photo: Fartein Rudjord/UiO
Oratorios
Orchestral works
Choral Music
Chamber Music
Film, TV and Stage Music
nearly 200 Arrangements
Teaching and Lectures
Research
Reviews
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“Christophersen uses texts from war sailors, mixes them with poems and hymns, and the work's grand form is linked by the Latin requiem liturgy. He is excellent at orchestrating for wind orchestra with percussion, soloists and choir. [...] Not least, the strong moods come from the composer's melodic material and harmonic use - but there is still something about the instrumentation that is so exciting that you often sit on the edge of your seat in tense anticipation and amazement at the sounds.” Magnus Andersson in Klassekampen / Musikkmagasinet, 20th June 2025.
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“This double CD is formidable. Christophersen's ability to give space to both text and music is - as on his previous major vocal work "The Lapse and Time" - brilliant. The music not only helps to substantiate the text, but definitely helps to set a sonic framework around an experience that is of the rare fine kind.” Trond Erikson
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The album begins with "Concerto for violin and strings" by Bjørn Morten Christophersen (b. 1976) - a composer who constantly arouses excitement among both audiences and critics. At the latest in 2022, he an album together with the same orchestra in the oratorio "The Lapse of Time" - a work that has been highly appreciated both on record and in the concert hall. On this disc, there is, however, a violin concerto with the very talented Ai-Ling Chiu as soloist. Parts of the work is based on the Taiwanese song "Longing for your return". And it is exciting to hear how Christophersen weaves this work. Because it is indeed weaving it is. Fragments of the song can be found again in the work and towards the end the composer makes an ingenious move. Instead of a wonderfully uplifting ending, the delicate melody comes in a subdued and beautiful package. All brilliantly performed by a particularly fine soloist.
Trond Erikson in Den klassiske CD-bloggen.
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Brian Morton on The Lapse of Time in Gramophone, 28.06.2023
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«Christophersen vet hva han gjør, han vet hva han vil, og han vet hvordan han skal få det til.»
Maren Øsrtavik om Credo, et credis i Ballade, 12.09.2023.
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«Christophersen skriver så godt at han burde være langt mer kjent.»
Magnus Andersson i Klassekampen, 15.09.2023
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«This recording is a terrific achievement. Christophersen’s work is a complex, large-scale piece of writing that is clearly taxing for both singers and players. The resulting recording has a real immediacy and filmic vividness.»
Robert Hugill on The Lapse of Time
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The Lapse of Time, an Oratorio on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Album): «Christophersens tonespråk er sanselig og lett å like, og han er en formidabel orkestrator. Her er akkorder som gradvis får nye farger, plutselige vekslinger i stemning og lange utviklinger i ensembleklangen. At nyanserikdommen blir så omfattende med et orkester som er relativt begrenset i størrelse, er imponerende»
Magnus Andersson i Klassekampen, 31.10.2022
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Krigsseilerrekviem (A Requiem for Sailors at War): «en utrolig vakker musikk, der skjønnhet og ubotelig sorg framtrer i en begrepsløs forening. En sånn paradoksal forsoning eksisterer jo ikke i det virkelige livet, men kan oppleves i musikken dersom komponisten evner å vise oss det. Det gjør altså Bjørn Morten Christophersen i sitt Krigsseilerrekviem – et nytt norsk musikalsk storverk».
Helge Iberg, Ballade, 15.06.2022
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Woven Brass: «Tøff og original brass». «…du verden så originalt og vakkert…»
Tor Hammerø, Nettavisen June 2018
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«Noen ganger så stemmer ting 100 prosent».
Terningkast 6Trond Erikson on Woven Brass: in Den klassiske CD-bloggen, 10.01.2018
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«Mesterlig messingblåsermusikk […] Lekent, utforskende, melodisk og dynamisk» Terningkast 6 på både musikk og lyd.
RES on Woven Brass in Stereopluss, November 2017
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The Lapse of Time: «Exceptionally successful on Darwin», «This music is so great […] that one wants to hear it again and again.»
Ole Dahl Rossbach, Tidens Krav, 04.11.2013
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Recitatives: «..dieses brillante Orchesterstück…. Schöpfung und Nachschöpfung schienen hier aus den gleichen glasklaren Quellen zu kommen.»
Ingo Hoddick, Rheinische Post, 6.10.2010 on Recitatives
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«Ein kontrastreiches Variationswerk mit einer, dem Titel gemäß, unmittelbar ansprechenden rhetorischen Kraft und einer belebenden Klangvielfalt.»
Pedro Obiera, NRZ, 6.10.10 on Recitatives
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«Christophersen (…) fully succeeds at pushing the bounds of choral writing while maintaining an emotional directness that never loses touch with his audience. (…) In Gjenfødelsen, his setting of a text by painter Edvard Munch, with viola accompaniment, his use of extended vocal techniques and rich choral textures is expert, and his control of his seemingly disparate elements creates a compelling, powerfully unified composition.»
Allmusic.com on Audiens
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«There isn’t one dull moment in any of his compositions, and his efforts here bode brightly for the future of Norwegian music and choral music generally.»
Audiophile Audition on Audiens
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«This is a phenomenal disc. (…) This is NOT a recipe for bland uniformity! The music, especially that of the composer who dominates the disc, Bjorn Morten Christophersen (b. 1976), is vivid, varied, and deeply expressive.»
SA-CD.net on Audiens
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«Christophersens tonespråk springer fra det naive og enkle via det dramatiske til det nesten psykedeliske. Effekten er en gripende historie hvor vi som lyttere tvinges i dialog med denne stakkars paven»
Magnus Andersson in Morgenbladet on Audiens
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«Gjenfødelsen» av Bjørn Morten Christophersen innledes med et nær sagt herlig primalskrik og nagler ørene fast til høytalerne.»
Smaalenene on Audiens
WRITINGS
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SUMMARY
Johan Svendsen is one of the most influential Scandinavian composers of the nineteenth century. He contributed in particular to the orchestral repertoire in Scandinavia and he was a celebrated conductor throughout Europe. This thesis presents the first thorough examination of all surviving sketches and compositional exercises from Svendsen’s hand. The study has two main objectives: first a philological mapping of the physical sources and, second, a discussion of the act of writing music, and how this act influenced the composer’s imagination, musical style and aesthetics. It is also discussed whether Svendsen’s relatively limited repertoire of sketching methods impacted on his compositional drought from his fourties. The central sources, found in 2007, are six notebooks containing both exercises written in Leipzig in 1864–65 and sketches written mainly in Christiania in the 1870s and 80s. Otherwise, sketches survive on loose leaves, in almanacs and autograph scores for a number of completed works. This material emerged over Svendsen’s lifetime, but it presents itself as a landscape of fixed objects today. What the sketches ‘express’ is interpreted based upon their visual appearance, physical position, musical content, relationship to other sources, and knowledge of Svendsen’s life and oeuvre. The genesis of Svendsen’s mature works is elucidated through his sketching habits, compositional exercises and juvenilia. Works have emerged from broad perspectives, from a host of alternatives to a set of ‘aesthetically harmonised solutions’ represented in the fixed objects of published scores. Musical ideas have wandered from one work to another, even over the course of decades before they found their ‘home’ in a completed work, and some ideas are ‘still circling’ with their immanent potentialities, such as in the drafts for a lost or unfinished symphony. The ‘openness’ that sketches present in relation to completed scores distorts our understanding of the intention behind them. This study of the fixed documents proposes a dialectical understanding of the open and the hidden, of possibilities and restrictions, as panoramic constraints.Download from University of Oslo website.
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Read on Ballade.no
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bio
The Norwegian composer B. Morten Christophersen (1976-) has written works on commission from Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, Royal Norwegian Navy Band and The National Norwegian Opera Chorus, Oslo International Church Music Festival, Ålesund Chamber Music Festival, Schola Cantorum (Oslo), Ensemble 96 as well as Norwegian Broadcasting Coorperation (NRK) and others. He has also written nearly 200 arrangements, mostly for orchestra. He won the Norwegian Grammy, Spellemannsprisen, as Composer of the Year 2025 for his large-scaled work Krigsseilerrekviem and was nominated in the same category for his oratorio The Lapse on Time, based on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 2022. From 2024 he holds the Norwegian Government ’s Artist Grant for five years (Statens kunstnerstipend).
Christophersen is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo and has been teaching composition, arranging, harmony, orchestration and counterpoint there since 2003. In 2016 he completed his PhD on the Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen's sketches and music theory exercises.
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