Icelandic violinist Sif Margrét Tulinius commissioned three works in 2020 and presents them on this new recording from Ulysses Arts. The three composers, Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson, Hugi Guðmundsson, and Viktor Orri Árnason, had their works presented in the concert series Bach & Modernity. In that set of concerts, each composer’s work was played alongside J.S. Bach’s three violin sonatas from 1720 to create a dialogue between past and present separated by some 300 years. The commission from the performer to the composers gave them complete freedom, with the exception that they could not include any electronics, since that would not have been extant in Bach’s time.

Sif Margrét Tulinius

Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson
Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson’s Partíta opens the album. Born in 1952, Ragnarsson started with the piano as a child before attending Brandeis University to study theory and composition. The range of his work includes pieces for solo instruments to symphonic works, vocal music for solo and choral voices, and finally, music for theatre and films. His statement about his work is that he found it enormously freeing to have an open remit. There’s no meaning or message beyond the music, which is only about itself.
Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson: Partíta – I. Vigoroso, liberamente
Hugi Guðmundsson (b. 1977) started his studies at the Reykjavik College of Music before pursuing further studies in Denmark at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen and in The Netherlands at the Sonology Institute for work in electronic and computer music. His work, Praesentia, is a contrast to his first violin concerto, entitled Absentia. The work is the opposite of absence and is about presence. It is in rondo form where the repeating sections are based on simple choral construction, but between those returns, the violin wanders freely.

Hugi Guðmundsson
Hugi Guðmundsson: Praesentia
The final composer, Viktor Orri Árnason (b. 1987), studied violin and viola at the Iceland University of Arts before attending the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin, where he studied composition and conducting. Árnason takes up the idea of ‘one of the great mysteries of the world…when we calculate the total mass’ of the university, ‘85% of the mass that we define as reality’ is missing. ‘The piece Dark Gravity wonders about the nature of this unexplainable mass’.

Viktor Orri Árnason
In her commissioned works, Tulinius has brought together three generations of Icelandic composers, each with a different background – some with education in the US (Ragnarsson) and others with European backgrounds (Guðmundsson and Árnason). Each, however, is well-established as a composer and brings an authority of voice that is welcome, particularly if they were paired with a work by J.S. Bach for their premieres. Unfortunately, the Bach works are not included in this album, but the works presented are strong and intriguing.
De Lumine: Contemporary Music from Iceland for Solo Violin
Sif Margrét Tulinius, violin
Ulysses Arts: UA240090
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