The sound of Rued Langgaard's music is unique and undefinable. His late violin sonatas were written in the mid-twentieth century, and look both forward and back. With their intimacy and sense of longing, the sonatas have a nostalgic character, yet Rued Langgaard was more than just a very late Late Romantic who cultivated musical peculiarities and moods from a bygone age; he was a profoundly original composer whose musical ideas and visionary music remain something unique today.
Rued Langgaard's late violin sonatas come from a period in the composer's life when his role as a loner in Danish musical life had truly become clear. In 1940, at the age of 47, Langgaard went into a kind of exile when he was engaged as organist of the Cathedral in Ribe. In the city he met a violinist who inspired him to experiment with the violin sonata after a 25-year break from the genre. The work was intense and innovative. Langgaard composed four sonatas over a period of a year, and every morning between 3 and 7 a.m. he sat totally immersed in the writing of his music.
Dacapo's new CD with Langgaard's late violin sonatas outstandingly demonstrates Rued Langgaard's radical originality. On the face of it the music can sound like Romantic pastiche, but one should not be fooled: Langgaard constantly bends and stretches the old forms and creates new interrelationships. One of the four sonatas, the Short Violin Sonata, has concentration of the musical material at its centre. Other sonatas show Langgaard's strongly religious, imagery-creating side, with titles like Parce nobis, Jesu! and Écrasez l`infame, which almost literally follows Voltaire's call ‘Crush this infamy!'.
Dacapo Records is proud to present two of the world's leading interpreters of Langgaard in intense interaction on the second and last CD in the series of Rued Langgaard's violin sonatas.