Well done. Thank you very much.
A tall, elderly gentleman in the third row of the parterre stands up and gestures kindly to the conductor on the podium in the Concert Hall, Fabien Gabel.
The praise came from none other than the composer of the piece, Poul Ruders. He attended the dress rehearsal of his latest work, Sound and Simplicity, together with 1,000 members of the Friends. And he really liked the interpretation.
Poul Ruders was also at the rehearsals on Monday and Tuesday.
- Was there anything that surprised you when you heard your work played by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra?
-Only comfortable. It was insanely beautiful.
-"It got better and better every time," says Poul Ruders. He is a very meticulous conductor, and even the few passages that he asked the orchestra to rehearse during the rehearsal on Thursday morning after a full run-through became even better on that occasion, says the satisfied composer.
The work is in seven movements, written for orchestra and accordion. The accordion, a kind of advanced accordion, was played by the young Bjarke Mogensen.
-Why the accordion?
-"Because it blends so well with an orchestra. It has become a trilogy," says Poul Ruders, who has twice before used this combination of orchestra and solo instrument in his compositions. In Songs and Rhapsodies for accordion and wind quintet and in Seranade on the Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
-The title promises sound and simplicity. The subtitle is Seven Pillars of Music, the seven pillars of music - doesn't that signal the exact opposite of simplicity?
-No, not at all. All music is sound, but not all music is simple. Columns of music are extremely simple. Several of the seven movements are extremely simple. The second movement ”Trance” lasts 20 seconds. The third movement ”Haiku” consists of four notes that are moved around," says the composer, who just turned 70 and published a book on the occasion, which Ruders himself mentioned on this site last month. He declares simplicity to be a virtue that he appreciates more and more with age
The concept of the ”Seven Pillars” is used in several famous novels: Jane Austen's ”Sense and Sensibility” and in ”Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). But Ruders emphasises that it is not
the ones that inspired his music. Arthur Krasilnikov's ”Eye of the Whale”, in which he describes the marvellous sound of drops hitting a stone, a leaf, a branch, gravel, cement, the string of the drying rack and the roof.
-It inspired the first movement, ”Rain”, while Doris Lessing's ”Mara and Dann” inspired the fourth movement, ”Smoke” with its phrases:
-The air was full of dust and smoke. The sky was a yellowish swirl of dark smoke full of black bits drifting by, and the sun was just a lighter spot in the smoke.
The seventh movement - the last one is also inspired by nature. It's called ”Wolf Moon” and Poul Ruders talks enthusiastically about the beautiful and large ”Red Moon”, which occurs especially in January.