Composer Rune Glerup (b. 1981) is known for creating sculptural and crystal-clear soundscapes and is influenced by the art scene in Berlin and especially in Paris. Glerup received the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize 2024 in October for his violin concerto Om Lys og Lethed, written in close collaboration with violinist Isabelle Faust.

Another fruitful collaboration has been with the French string quartet Quatuor Diotime, for whom Glerup has written several works. On 10 January, the album Perhaps Thus the End will be released, recorded by Quatuor Diotima and Danish clarinetist Jonas Frølund. Pre-save the album here and listen to a single below as you read on.

The absurd beauty of everyday life

The new album is named after Rune Glerup's string quartet Perhaps Thus the End , written for and dedicated to Quatuor Diotima. The work is strongly influenced by one particular author. ‘As for the inspiration for this piece,’ writes Glerup in a foreword to the score, ‘I owe a lot to the works of Samuel Beckett but also to taking a walk in the park, reading the news, drinking beer in a smoke-filled bar, failing to comprehend the endings, beginnings, repetitions, beginnings, endings of this world.’

Beckett's spirit is evident in the title of the work, which reflects the writer’s fixation on the absurd beauty of existence, the passing of time and the cessation of things. Glerup is not the only Danish composer who was influenced by Beckett - the same goes for Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and there are also parallels
between the two composers’ actual music, which share an animalistic nervous energy and a tendency to place wholly different ideas in close proximity to
one another to create unexpected musical byproducts.

Hommage to past voices

The album also features Glerup's clarinet quintet Still Leaning Towards This Machine with Quatuor Diotima playing with Danish clarinetist Jonas Frølund. It's a work that fuses past and present in a tribute to the voices that shaped Glerup’s own. For example, there is a quote from Boulez's Piano Sonata No. 2 as a form of hommage to the birth of exploratory music in the 1950s and 60s, but there are also references to Beethoven, Stravinsky, Mozart and Brahms. The references are skilfully woven into the work, together with electronic elements.