Fartein Valen Concertos & Instrumental Music – Arve Tellefsen

The principle of hope

Fartein Valen is one of Norway´s most resepected and renowned composers and is regarded as a groundbreaking artist for modernist music in Norway. Through his illumination of the human condition – our conditio humana – he enters his time as hardly any other contemporary composer has. It is a transcendence of time and ideology, this cantus firmus of faith, that unites Valen with the composers who, through time and space, have provided courage and hope – is what unites him with the great tradition of human ethics. But it is in his zeal as a spiritual guide that he has found a central place in our spiritual history.

The spiritual dimension clearly comes to the front in his Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano, op. 5. The work heralds a new era in Norwegian instrumenal music. It radiates a heretofore unknown emotional intensity and concentration cemented by an amazingly structural logic and clarity. Performed by a range of leading Norwegian musicians, orchestras and conductors, such as Arve Tellefsen, Eva Knardahl, Christian Eggen and The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Valens modernistic, spiritual and humanistic sensibilities comes into its own throughout fantastic works such as his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 37, Epithalamion, op. 19, or An die Hoffnung, op. 18 no. 2.