Rune Glerup

Rune Glerup long applied the rubric normally employed by visual artists and sculptors to the discipline of composing notated and electroacoustic music. His conception of sound as an almost physical structure saw his works compared to objects a person can walk around - like hanging mobiles, suspended in the air, that find their own equilibrium according to the variables of structural acoustics and human performance. Recent works have revealed another side to Glerip’s music: a very Nordic combination of poetry and lucidity, realized in a series of major concertante works including the violin concerto for Isabelle Faust, Om Lys og Lyshed (‘On Light and Lightness’).

The urge to hear the same sounds differently first led Glerup from his native Denmark to the European mainland. He immersed himself in the artistic life of Berlin and studied sound and electroacoustic music at IRCAM in Paris. Inspired by the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Glerup developed a distinctive view of music as a three-dimensional structure that bears a direct relationship to the space in which it is performed.

His first listed work, Trio (2000), crystalizes the idea of material stripped of descriptive or dynamic qualities, relying instead on its own concrete and constant properties and the vibration, resonance, attraction or unease drawn from those properties when placed in the company of other, equally clearly defined material. Soon Glerup became convinced that the more his objects defined their own space, the more fertile and tense their relationships would become. When the order of the objects is shuffled, as in objets/décalages (2008), the shift in context has the effect of a lighting change that sees each object illuminated anew.

Those ideas are advanced in dust encapsulated #1 (2008-09) and dust encapsulated #2 (2009). At the time, Glerup was already considering how he might frame such micro-relationships within a more comprehensive macro-structure. He invested the second piece, scored for winds, strings and piano, with a hurtling energy that suggests a unifying impulse despite the continued separation of the constituent parts, thus bringing the overall structure into sharper focus.

Around half the scores on Glerup’s work-list carry formal titles, a reflection of his ambivalent relationship with canonical traditions. In his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2009-10) the composer suggests that musical dogmas can provoke composers even if they provide helpful frameworks at the same time. This rumbustious, delicate and exquisitely colourful work throws 13 separate musical objects together, refusing to instigate a traditional conversational development. It was adapted for small orchestra in 2016 to a commission from Ensemble Intercontemporain, who gave the first performance of the smaller piece that year at the Philharmonie de Paris. Both versions remain in currency.

In the 2010s, Glerup’s music took on a new eloquence and depth. Each chapter of Sonata in Seven Movements (2011) harbors a particular form of expression, while the thematic gestures in Piano Quartet (2014) and Clarinet Quintet (2014-15) are notably more weighty and refined. Six Movements for Piano Trio (2016-17) extends a Nordic tradition for drilling deep into simple, shapely ideas by subjecting them to the rigor of standard structural forms: rondo, passacaglia, scherzo. With this piece and Symphony (2015-16), chiseled, functionalist mechanics and Nordic clarity combine with a heightened sense of instrumental imagination and control of ‘uncontrollable’ energy.

Om Lys og Lyshed, first performed by Isabelle Faust in 2022, was nominated for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Music Prize and won both the 2022 Carl Prize for best orchestral work and the 2024 Nordic Council Music Prize, whose jury described it as ‘objective, sculptural and crystal-clear.’ The same year, the French string quartet Quatuor Diotima released a recording of chamber music by Glerup, Perhaps Thus the End. The album was unanimously praised and described by one critic as ‘unexpectedly addictive’.

Glerup’s orchestral works have been performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, SWR Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Odense Symphony Orchestra and Copenhagen Phil. He has collaborated with the world’s most distinguished new music ensembles including London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen and Uusinta Ensemble and his piano trio Movements (2017) was written for Trio Con Brio Copenhagen.

Glerup has been a featured composer at festivals in Paris, Venice, Monte-Carlo, Helsinki and beyond. In addition to IRCAM, he studied in the soloist’s class at the Royal Danish Academy of Music with Bent Sørensen, Niels Rosing-Schow and Hans Peter Stubbe Teglbjærg and now teaches composition and instrumentation there. From 2012-14 he was Artistic Advisor to Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen and from 2012-14 was Artistic Director of KLANG – Copenhagen Avant-Garde Music Festival.

Andrew Mellor, 2025