About Light and Lightness
Concerto for violin and orchestra
Listen
Commissioned and premiered by The Danish National Symphony Orchestra with Isabelle Faust, violin and Thomas Søndergård condcucting.
Movements:
1. Worldless [00.00]
2. The swift that sleeps in the air [03.29]
3. Water Mirror [08.45]
4. Evening [12.40]
5. Duplicate - Cadenza - After-light [17.14]
Live recording from the world premiere in 2022.
Isabelle Faust, Violin
Thomas Søndergård, Conductor
Danish National Symphony Orchestra
Background
"My violin concerto would never have been written if I had not met Isabelle Faust. At a time when I had not written a single note for several months, doubting if I would ever write anything again, her interest and energy was the cause of new inspiration. Just as important was her special way of playing - with intellect, heart and a rare, delicate sensibility. Her personality and musicianship struck a chord in me, in my music, which gave my thoughts a new direction.
The violin concerto marks a change in my music towards a simpler and lighter expression. An expression that also contains detached glimpses from my childhood's endless summers by the North Sea. Birds, high and slow on a blue sky, and the evening quietly descending. The special light, the distant sounds. But also the confusion, repetitions and dead ends of the world. An expression that, more than in my previous music, is "About Light and Lightness.""
- Rune Glerup
Isabelle Faust about the concerto
"I find this piece extremely touching, and extremely tender and interior. It's a very playful, and a highly personal piece, and I've been immediately drawn towards this kind of music and writing.
[Glerup] has such a clear writing and he has been working for a long time on this piece. For 2-3 years, he was working and thinking, and now he came up with a version which is so perfect. Crystal clear writing and very adjusted to the violin.
I think it's a beautiful beautiful piece, with a lot of incredible atmosphere."
- Isabelle Faust
The Carl Prize
"About Light and Lightness" was awarded the "Carl Prize" for best orchestral piece of the year 2022. The prize is awarded every year by the association of the danish music publishers.
Press Reviews
Politiken ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
This Thursday's concert was poetic, bright and light.
Glerup's new violin concerto written for the German star musician Isabelle Faust was unfolded only at the top of the sound spectrum, in the very brightest, quietest part of the sound space that our ears can perceive. And at the same time in a light, poetic and direct way. Not light as in easy, but atmospheric in nature.
Glerup has worked extremely meticulously with the very small building blocks of music since he emerged a good 10 years ago as a newly minted composer out of the elite Parisian institute for electronic music, IRCAM. It is as if nothing is given to him in advance, but that each work is constructed with a new recipe and new techniques for the same ingredi- ents. That is, the classical instruments. That's also how the new violin concerto felt like.
Faust ended superbly with the last movement, beautifully summing up the elements of the four previous movements in a solo cadenza that finally, finally also let a couple of quite ordinary beautifully vibrating romantic notes into the concert hall.
Kristeligt Dagblad ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Danish Radio Orchestra had a celebrety visit – and the result was outstanding.
The work is in five movements and was specially written for the German musician, who of course performed it with great emotion. Fierce and fervor alternated movement by movement, with the fourth movement "Evening" as a beautiful example of the latter.
Information
World star premiered a spellbinding Danish violin concerto.
The first movement »Worldless« was a distant sparkling and flashing light source.
Glerup creates a breathtaking space in »Evening«, where Isabelle Faust could show her unique sound control in the slow cantilena, delicately soft in clean lines, sometimes with the muted coloring of the brass.
Søndergård and Faust were completely in sync with this spellbinding music.
Danish Radio, P2
Just magical! [...] Five moments, extremely image-creating, refined, contrast-filled and very very sensual music.
It was almost so intense at times that you hardly knew which instrument you were hearing bright, light tones - God help me, light tones! It was very, very beautiful!
An almost zen-like feeling, even though we are very much in a light nordic – Danish nature setting [..] we were somehow placed out of time in a quite magical way.
What an experience to hear this music sound for the first time, Rune Glerup's violin concerto 'About Light and Lightness'.