On the album Almost in G, Scenatet are playing a diverse selection of pieces by the Danish experimental composer Christian Winther Christensen. Christensen is one of the ensemble’s recurring collaborators and for good reason: “Scenatet are an ensemble particularly well suited to my music: a close-knit group with enough time to go into detail, and musicians who thrive on a challenge”, he has said.

The pieces on Almost in G were carefully selected for Scenatet. The compositions manage to put the full range of the ensemble’s expertise to use: their technical mastery of the instruments, of course, but also their fearlessness in regard to leaving the safe hiding places behind their instruments in order to explore radically unorthodox techniques. Take for instance the album’s titular piece: a small, detailed work, constantly circling about the tonality of G, where, in the beginning, the strings of the piano are completely covered in tape, which is then gradually removed as the piece continues.

The result is a piece that, as the daily newspaper Politiken wrote in a highly positive review, “sounds like a craftsman making sequences of sounds at his planing bench”. In that sense, the piece is an example of Christensen and Scenatet’s penchant for challenging the divide between the familiar and the unfamiliar: a wildly unfamiliar technique can suddenly produce sounds that resemble the sounds of our everyday life, while a familiar instrumental palette can lead to sounds that appear strange and even alienating.

In 2019, the album was nominated for the German Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in the category Contemporary Classical Music.

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The album was very well received by listeners:

“There is an urgent originality at work here that absolutely sparkles next to less daring new classical recordings. Comparisons aside, it is a thrilling hour of compositions expertly performed by the SCENATET Ensemble for Art & Music,”
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Toneshift.net calls Christian Winther Christensen a thoughtful and enigmatic composer “showing us the entire construction process in a manneristic fashion, and giving himself the time to invent and alchemically morph materials into other states of being to juxtapose them in a schematic and very interesting way.”

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“…vivid, emotional, modern, luminous and filled with colourful contrasts and stunning surprises.”
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Composed by Christian Winther Christensen
All tracks is performed by Scenatet 
Recorded at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, August 2017
Recording producer and sound engineer: Peter Barnow
Editing and mixing: Peter Barnow and Christian Winther Christensen
Mastering: Peter Barnow

Danish Composer’s Society, Solistforeningen, the Danish Conductors Association and DJBFA – Composer and Songwriters’ Production Pool and Koda’s Cultural Funds.