Two years ago, Christina Åstrand, first concertmaster of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra (DNSO), got a call from the composer Signe Lykke. The two were acquaintances: Åstrand had played a solo piece by Lykke; Lykke was aware of Åstrand from her central position in Danish musical life (‘I knew her as the silver-haired woman who sits at the front of the radio orchestra’).
There had been murmurings about Åstrand commissioning a new violin concerto from Lykke. On the phone, the conversation spiralled into something bigger. It has since spawned a project that has criss-crossed northern Europe, involved hundreds of musicians from multiple ensembles and even seen the formation of a new company jointly owned by the two, through which they will work to reinvest capital into new projects. A particularly fertile meeting of minds, it has also challenged a good number of orthodoxies the classical music world holds dear – particularly that corner of it concerned with string playing.
Fifteen years separate Åstrand and Lykke. In conversation, they resemble a pair of teenagers: breathlessly talkative, frequently interrupting one another. Their effusive sparring – at Lykke’s period-featured studio in the atmospheric heart of old Copenhagen – is riddled with expletives and punctuated by cascading laughter. It bursts with the enthusiasm of ideological emancipation.
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