INTERVIEW / Back to the good old ways: Martin Anderson talks to Norwegian composer Ragnar Soderlind

The bulk of the audience at the Royal Albert Hall for the Prom on 24 August will doubtless be there to hear the Oslo Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons in a familiar programme. They have a surprise in store. The opening item of the concert is Trauermusik, an explosive orchestral piece by the Norwegian composer Ragnar Soderlind. Norway has long laid emphasis on its musical modernists, but Soderlind is acquiring a reputation as a leading spokesman for the 'traditional' values of tonality. Opportunities to hear his orchestral music live in Britain are none the less rare. This is the first UK performance of his most widely played work.

Soderlind is a warm, expansive man, with a hearty laugh. In his spacious flat in Oslo, he explained how he came to find his musical voice. In the late 1960s he was studying in Helsinki with two of the leading figures of Finnish music, Erik Bergman, an experimental atonalist, and Joonas Kokkonen, a traditionalist with a touching faith in the humble triad. 'Officially, I was studying counterpoint with Kokkonen, but more and more it was composition. Bergman was concerned with aspects of 12-tone technique, which didn't suit me. I turned more to free tonality and found my own style after studying with Kokkonen, a kind of new Romantic style.'

But Soderlind is not the kind of new Romantic who has stumbled on to tonality and doesn't know what to do with it. His music sits squarely in a long tradition of 20th-century tonality; indeed, it is an explicit attempt to repair the damage of decades. 'I am trying to build a bridge between late Romanticism and modern experience. Too much modern music has been trying to cut away what went before and replace it with something entirely new. The history of music before the rise of modernism consisted of trying to do something in addition. I hope to be a traditional composer in the best sense, saying something that has been said before but in another way.'

Trauermusik is a young man's piece, written when the composer was 23, and is explicitly political. The composer outlined its background. 'I was finishing my studies and had very strange feelings about modernism after studying all this 'organisational' music. I was having difficulties in starting a new piece. What happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a catalyst that produced the inspiration - romantic, tragic inspiration - and as a result the piece is very spontaneous. There were events that had happened before - the murder of Martin Luther King, for example, and the tragic situation in Biafra. In fact I had a very tragic feeling about the world in general at this time, but Czechoslovakia was the real trigger for Trauermusik. It was written in 12 days. I can remember looking at the very dramatic television pictures, seeing what was happening from day to day. So it is almost a kind of musical journalism, reportage - a bit like Shostakovich in the Seventh Symphony.'

Soderlind has composed other political pieces. The Second Symphony of 1981 used the yoiks - chants - of the Sami people of northern Norway in an explicit protest against the building of a hydroelectric dam. But not any more. 'I have turned to non-political subjects,' he says. 'I am not that spontaneous any more, not that aggressive.' Instead, he says his music is 'emotional, it has something to do with pictures, tone-paintings, perhaps. I like large contrasts.'

These days he is very busy. He has a new ballet based on Munch paintings opening at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics next spring. He is writing librettos. He is turning to chamber music. And he is getting commissions all the time - 'in fact,' he says, 'I have written only three or four works without commission. With the Fourth Symphony, for example, I told the Oslo Philharmonic that I was intending to write a symphony and they commissioned it. I had my first commission (the tone-poem Polaris) from Bergen Philharmonic when I was 24.'

Does he allow himself some satisfaction that fashion is catching up with his sort of music? 'Well, in Norway my music is 'out': I am not played in festivals. The interest in it is much stronger abroad - in the United States and Vienna, for example. Still, the musicians,' he emphasises the word, 'like to play my music. I try to give everyone something interesting to do. I have been a brass player so I know what it's like to sit for long periods without having anything to do but just sit there, counting and counting. And so I decided to try to write music that was interesting for every group in the orchestra.'

And how does Soderlind compose? The traditionalist composer gives a modernist answer. 'I go straight to my Macintosh]' he says.