Sif Margrét Tulinius: De Lumine
Ulysses Arts

While violinist Sif Margrét Tulinius has ties to other countries, her strongest one is to Iceland, her home country. She was born in Lyon, France and, thanks to a Fulbright Grant, was able to study in the United States at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Stony Brook in Ohio and New York, respectively. She did so, however, after first acquiring her Soloist - Performer's Diploma from the Reykjavík College of Music in the spring of 1991, under the guidance of the then-concertmaster of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. That relationship resumed when she became the orchestra's Associate Concertmaster in 2000, a position she held until 2016 when she moved to Berlin and performed with the world-renowned Berliner Philharmoniker and other orchestras. Despite that career shift, she remains a prominent figure in the Icelandic music scene and has performed with a number of Icelandic ensembles, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the Icelandic Opera Orchestra among them.

As if designed to reaffirm her connection to her homeland, Tulinius's latest recording features works by Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson (b. 1952), Hugi Guðmundsson (b. 1977), and Viktor Orri Árnason (b. 1987) she commissioned in 2020 and which were premiered by her soon after in a concert series titled Bach and Modernity. The programme paired the new compositions with J. S. Bach's three 1720 sonatas for solo violin, the idea being that the juxtaposition would engender musical conversations between the early composer and his contemporary counterparts. Not only are the Icelandic composers centuries removed from Bach, they also generally span three generations, making for additional interesting points of comparison. The only stipulations the three had to follow were to eschew electronics and retain some connection, however tangential, to Bach's work; otherwise, they had complete creative freedom to explore the violin's vast musical and technical potential. Recorded in Reykjavík in November 2022, De Lumine presents the world premiere recordings of the three commissions.

Up first is Ragnarsson's Partita, a five-part work that he says, refreshingly, “is not about anything”—meaning, that is, that while it does intensively explore the violin's expressive range, it possesses no particular meaning or message. For Ragnarsson, whose body of work extends from lieder and choir material to symphonic pieces, musicals, and opera, “It is wonderfully liberating to write music about nothing in particular—music which is itself and only about itself.” Initiating the album with authority, the vigorous first movement finds Tulinius emoting aggressively, double-stops alternating seamlessly with passionate melodic phrases as the violin incrementally ascends into its uppermost register. Her prowess as a player is evident at each step, whether it be gentle or truculent. Whereas the second and fourth movements exude a calming, contemplative character, the third reinstates the bellicosity of the first. The expansive fifth proves as scintillating as its movement marking promises.

The Reykjavík-born Guðmundsson's represented by the single-movement Praesentia, whose title he describes as a mirror of sorts to his first violin concerto Absentia. In his words, Praesentia is “in a rondo form of some sort” where the music deploys repetitive chords to repeatedly gravitate toward a simple chorale, with virtuosic passages emerging along the way. Like Ragnarsson, Guðmundsson has produced a range of music that includes solo and orchestral pieces, but he is best known for his choral music. Maybe so, but Praesentia is riveting, though key to its impact is a sixteen-minute performance by Tulinius that's never less than mesmerizing. One's attention never strays during her patient, probing, and methodical examination of the material. During one gripping passage, flurries of string patterns arrest the ear as they wend their mournful way, while others venture into dance-like episodes and lyrical solemnity.

Concluding the recording is the four-part Dark Gravity by Árnason, an Icelandic composer and since fall 2021 the conductor and Artistic Director of the Reykjavík Orkestra at Harpa Hall. In addition to studying composition and conducting at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, Árnason studied violin and viola at the Icelandic University of the Arts and is active as an arranger, recording artist, and violin performer; it makes perfect sense that Tulinius would commission him to contribute to her Bach and Modernity project. For Dark Gravity, he drew for inspiration from the fact that the total mass of the physical reality of which we're aware constitutes a mere fifteen percent. A meditation on the mysterious nature of this unaccounted-for mass, the work progresses from the sombre introspection of its haunting opening part to the ethereal starkness of the droning second. The action briefly intensifies for the minute-long third before the fourth returns the work to a state of ghostly stillness.

February 2025