Performers & composers

Karsten Fundal

Artistic creation and lived life go together like Siamese twins for Karsten Fundal (b. 1966). If the one doesn’t function, the other becomes weakened and inactive. For Fundal this means being on top of things, and thus establishing proper relations with the surrounding world just as much as cultivating his artistic career. It’s about balance in life and in art, in the final analysis also about forming part of a meaningful social context, about establishing a kind of humanity and being something – for others as well as oneself. So when you consider Fundal’s music you also have to consider what exists alongside the art – all that in the end is the precondition for the art to be manifested in the form of musical expression.

Karsten Fundal has studied composition with Hans Abrahamsen and Ib Nørholm, Karl Aage Rasmussen and Per Nørgård. A meeting with Nigel Osborne and (especially) Morton Feldman in 1986 at Dartington took on great importance for Fundal’s development as a composer, and in the years 1987-88 he studied composition with Louis Andriessen in Holland.

In recent years Karsten Fundal has had the pleasure of seeing a rapidly increasing interest in his music, which has led to a large number of commissions for new works, and has gradually won him a place as the major composer of his generation. Fundal’s unmistakable talent has also evoked a response in the film world where, after great success with the music for the Dreyer film Mikaël (2003), premiered live with the Copenhagen Philharmonic, he wrote the music for Nikolaj Østergaard’s Robert-award-winning Kort Film Om Tro (Short Film About Faith) (Nordisk Film 2005). 

Karsten Fundal is now in the process of finishing the music for Peter Schønau Fog’s feature film Kunsten At Græde i Kor (The Art of Crying).  In 2005 Fundal was also awarded the three-year grant of the Danish Arts Foundation to develop a major music film project about globalization.

Among the most important of his other works we find the violin concerto Floating Lines – Broken Mirrors (1995-1996), the percussion concerto Ritornello al Contrario (1996-1997) and the ensemble work written for the Cikada Ensemble, Circadian Pulse (2002-2003). Then there are the four works in the Moebius series and of course the orchestral works Entropia (1997-2001) for soloists, choir and large orchestra – written for the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR – and the orchestral work Hush (2003-2004).

Karsten Fundal has been awarded the Wilhelm Hansen Composer’s Prize 1994, the Prize of the Danish Composers’ Society 1995, the Hvass Foundation’s Artist’s Grant 1995, the Queen Ingrid Memorial Grant 2005 and the Carl Nielsen Prize 2005. In 2005 he received the three-year grant of the Danish National Arts Foundation.

Mikaël (90')

Premiered august 2003.
Mikaël is a silent movie by the famous Danish Director T.H. Dreyer, from 1925. The movie is based on a novel by the equally famous danish author Herman Bang. 
The music is written for specifically for the movie, and is here performed by Copenhagen philharmonic Orhestra, Conducted by Martin Åkerwal.