With great sensibility and attention to history, composer Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen unites tradition with innovation. In his Violin Concerto from 2024 we hear both references to Lisztian Romantic fantasies and Arvo Pärt-esque chords in one dramatic, whirling merry-go-round.

The Violin Concerto is composed specially for the striking Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma and commissioned by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and on 14 November a recording of the work will be released on a digital album. Pre-save the album to your streaming library.

Ambitious collaboration

While Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen was composing the Violin Concerto he had a close dialogue with Simone Lamsma. It quickly became clear that she wasn’t afraid to take on a challenge: “After I had written the first ten minutes, I sent the sheet music to Simone. And she actually thought it was a bit too easy! So I stepped up the technical demands to show what the violin is really capable of,” Agerfeldt Olesen told DR in connection with the premiere in April.

Simone Lamsma said on the same occasion: “Thomas’s violin concerto is a work that looks both back into music history and forward. There is a strong contrast between passages of intense outbursts and drama and episodes of nakedness and silence.”

Already from the opening of the work, the drama which will unfold through the 30 minute long work is introduced. During the concert, the violin competes with tempestuous, shape-shifting orchestral chords, before eventually coaxing the music towards its calmer self and finally showing the path forward with love and beauty.

Tranformation from one work to another

The Violin Concerto has been many years in the making and in fact, the work grew out of Agerfeldt Olesen’s piano sonata from 2019, which was released on Dacapo Records last year:

“You’re in a phase of searching when you have to write a large-scale work like a violin concerto,” he said shortly before the premiere at DR Koncerthuset. “My piano sonata demanded my attention, and I realized that it was because the sonata was essentially a kind of preliminary study for something bigger,” he said.

The music in the two works is essentially the same, but when the piano music is orchestrated, it is transformed. Melodies change character, dynamic shifts take on a different weights, and the power of orchestratino reshapes musical meaning.