Fleur de verre

Program notes

About the Work

The evening opens with a contemporary voice: Fleur de verre (‘glass flower’) by the young Danish composer Sophie Søs Meyer. Meyer belongs to a generation of Scandinavian composers for whom orchestral sound is as much about texture, colour and atmosphere as about theme and development, and this piece begins from a vivid image. Its starting point is the skeleton flower, whose petals turn transparent in the rain: at once delicate and brittle, beautiful and on the edge of vanishing, it is the sort of fragile, ambiguous picture from which her music likes to grow.

Placing a work by a young composer at the head of a programme that ends with Brahms is a characteristic piece of Concertgebouw programming: it asks us to hear the great Romantic symphony with fresh ears, and to set the orchestra’s storied sound at the service of music being written right now. Rather than approach Fleur de verre with expectations drawn from the classics that follow, it rewards simply listening to its surfaces and colours.

What to Listen For

Come to this one with open ears and few preconceptions. With music of this kind, the rewards lie less in following tunes than in attending to texture and atmosphere: the way sounds emerge and dissolve, the play of orchestral colour, the sense of a fragile image (glass, light, a flower) translated into shifting sonority. Listen for how Meyer uses the full resources of the orchestra not to build a traditional argument but to conjure a state, an atmosphere, a single sustained image rendered in sound. It is a brief, concentrated opening, a pane of glass held up to the light before the Baroque-tinged Henze and the warmth of Brahms.