Violin Concerto

In Search of a Voice

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

The path to Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen’s Violin Concerto begins, unexpectedly, in 2019, in the Australian outback as record-breaking bushfires were raging across the country. Olesen was at home in Denmark, composing in his study as usual. Yet a violin concerto was far from his mind; instead, he was working on a piano sonata (recorded by Rolf Hind on Dacapo Records 8.224762). Watching the apocalyptic scenes playing out on the other side of the world, he naturally began to wonder what role he, as a composer, could meaningfully play in the face of such destruction. His response was to have the performer themselves interrogate the work – and by implication himself – as they were still playing. ‘Hello?’ interrupts the pianist. ‘Can I speak?’ he asks, before setting out a political–environmental–aesthetic critique of the moment.

It is an unusual musical gesture to say the least – Olesen himself admits that ‘there is a reason why, as a composer, you should not start talking in your music’ – and a still more unusual place from which to begin a violin concerto. And yet this is, in effect, what happened. The Concerto may not have been in Olesen’s mind when he began the Sonata, but it was by the time he finished. ‘I want to create a musical equivalent to what happens in the sonata, without the radical adjustment that language forces on the experience of the sonata’, he said in the wake of writing the piano piece.

The Violin Concerto is written in a single, thirty-minute movement, divided into three main sections. Compared to the Piano Sonata, it is a relatively conventional work: it does not contain any of the theatrics, interruptions or meta-commentary of the earlier composition. And it is not explicitly activist in its message. But it is also, in large part, essentially the same music. Apart from a handful of alterations in expressive markings and the like, about nine-tenths of the Concerto is, on paper at least, the same as the Sonata’s first movement. But what Olesen has done goes beyond mere orchestration. Instead, he says, the process of composition was a matter of finding and revealing (and then framing and supporting) the violin part that was hidden within the Sonata.

The key difference, of course, is the section, about two-thirds of the way in, when Olesen’s pianist begins to speak. In terms of duration, it does not make up the majority of the Sonata movement – which is otherwise a whirling merry-go-round of allusions to Romantic and post-Romantic styles, from Beethoven to Ravel and even beyond. But it is the most consequential thing that happens within it; it is the crisis point on which the whole work hangs. To keep everything except for this, then, brings an almost conceptual dimension to the Concerto: does all the music up to this point mean something different if the point it arrives at is different? And in which case, where does the meaning of the work reside? As the Piano Sonata itself demonstrates, Olesen is not shy about subverting expectations or playing games with semantics. And as he has said himself about the Concerto, ‘I want to create a music that has the same function as language does in the sonata.’

The moment in question is marked in the Concerto by a woodblock and bass drum tremolo (obviously not a feature of the piano original) around six minutes into its second section. The orchestral music continues to follow closely the Sonata music, but where Olesen had his pianist speak, he inserts cadenza-like material for the violin, beginning first with short interjections and building up into longer phrases. These phrases do not in any way seek to replicate the rhythm or duration of those spoken passages, but they have a similar impact in how they cut across the orchestral music, insisting that something is not quite right, and that irreconcilable forces must somehow be brought together.

Of the Sonata, Olesen describes its opening minutes as a restless, ‘almost mad’ shift from tonality to tonality, from musical style to musical style in search of a voice. It is this search that prefigures the crisis – of music’s purpose and meaning in the face of ecological and political catastrophe – that is reflected in the pianist’s spoken interruptions. In the Sonata, the solution is that love and beauty (epitomised by the solemn, Arvo Pärt-esque chords on which the music eventually settles) prevail; two further movements take the music past this crisis point and back towards abstraction. In the Concerto, there are not these additional moments of reflection. The ‘voice’ must be found within the music itself – and therefore in the soloist’s self-expression. Hence, the cadenzas in its third section that stand in for the pianist’s speech.

For the rest, the music’s impact has been transformed without altering any of the notes. Transferred to violin, the opening melody – which returns at significant points throughout – becomes darkly lyrical, where on the piano it appeared shy and distracted in its isolation. The entry of the massed orchestra that follows is inevitable in the Concerto context, where in the Sonata the switch to thick handfuls of notes was a shock. And so on, bar by orchestrated bar. At the very least, the transformation of one piece into the other is a lesson in the power of orchestration – that most neglected musical skill! – to shape musical meaning.

Of course, it is not necessary to know Olesen’s Piano Sonata in order to appreciate the drama of his Violin Concerto. That opening one-two of melody and maelstrom sets the stage of the drama. It ricochets the violin, almost unwillingly, into a bravura solo that competes with tempestuous, shape-shifting orchestral chords. After handing the reins to the clarinet, the violin takes the chance to soar above the turbulence and, in doing so, slowly restore a sense of calm. When the opening melody returns, at the end of this long wind-down, it is given to the oboe, signalling perhaps a belated reconciliation of orchestra and soloist.

The violin has other ideas, however. A series of accented crotchets signals the start of a new direction and turns our ears towards the deliciously rising Pärt chords that will soon become the principal antagonist to the Lisztian Romantic fantasy we have experienced so far, and eventually its uneasy resolution. Before then, however, comes the mirror canon of the work’s second main section; this is essentially the Concerto’s slow movement. It begins with a rising theme for horn, accompanied by delicate arpeggios – rising for the violin, descending for the harp. In between statements, the stately Pärt chords act as punctuation and disturbance, eventually destabilising the music towards that defining moment of crisis.

This is marked by a long cadenza, after which the orchestra crashes in with the fullest available force. In the Sonata, this served to depict the devastation in Australia (‘let me illustrate …’, says the pianist); here, it is simply the climax of an argument between opposing musical forces. Once more, it is left to the violin to restore order, which, eventually, it does, slowly coaxing the music towards its better, calmer self. And so the Concerto ends as the Sonata did, with love and beauty ultimately showing the path forward.
 

© Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2025

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a writer with a focus on new music. He is the author of the widely praised Music after the Fall (University of California Press) and The Music of Liza Lim(Wildbird), and has co-authored Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).