Wise Music Group are thrilled to announce that three Edition Wilhelm Hansen composers, Rune Glerup, Tyler Futrell, and Hugi Gudmundsson, are among the nominees for the Nordic Council Music Prize 2024. The nominations are a testament to the three composers’ significant impact on the contemporary music scene in their respective Scandinavian countries.
Danish composer Rune Glerup is nominated for his violin concerto About Light and Lightness written for Isabelle Faust and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
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
Icelandic composer Hugi Gudmundsson is nominated for his The Gospel of Mary for sinfonietta, choir, and solo soprano. This work is based on the apocryphal text attributed to Mary Magdalene. Fragments of the text were found in the 1890s and give Mary Magdalene, and women in general, significantly greater importance in early Christian society than the other non-apocryphal gospels.
The piece was commissioned by the Reykjavík Friends of the Arts Society, Oslo International Church Music Festival, and Aarhus Sinfonietta.
Finally, American-Norwegian composer Tyler Futrell is nominated for his work Stabat Mater, commissioned by Oslo International Church Music Festival and set to the classical Latin text of the same name from the Middle Ages. It is for solo soprano, mezzo-soprano, string orchestra, and harpsichord.
My intention in composing this piece was, in a sense, to write a Stabat Mater about the Stabat Mater – what it has, and has not, been over its 600-year musical history. In my reading, what it has largely not been is a humanistic representation of the agony of a mother watching her child brutally killed; neither has it really represented her natural attempts to comfort him, despite her own suffering. I also expand the view and treat the Stabat Mater as an example of the beautification of suffering more broadly. A challenge for me while writing the piece was to balance my wish to participate in the tradition of beautiful, melancholic music in Stabat Mater settings – which is what initially drew me to the project – while also looking at what that obscures.
— Tyler Futrell
The Nordic Council’s Music Prize is awarded to a contemporary living composer every other year and has previously been awarded to composers like Per Nørgård, Hans Abrahamsen, Karin Rehnqvist, Bent Sørensen, Arne Nordheim, and Sunleif Rasmussen. The winner is announced on October 22, 2024.
