Mari Samuelsen remembers her early childhood as a blur of nappies and violins. “I started playing in diapers, probably,” the acclaimed Norwegian violinist says. “In one way it’s good to start early, because the handcraft in it, it has to grow with you.”
She says this with a chuckle. But she adds that there is some accuracy to the stereotype of the musical prodigy as driven and wholly consumed by their art. “It has a big element of truth in it. Because that is the picture we have of classical musicians. You know – a very trained pianist from before he or she could walk.”
The 39-year-old stands out in the classical world as a widely admired outsider: a rebel with applause. She has trained with the best – her musical education includes time at the Barratt Due Institute of Music, in Oslo, and Zurich University of the Arts – but she never felt entirely at home in the stuffy realm of classical music.
It was while studying in Switzerland that she had the epiphany that would change her life: as a musician, Samuelsen didn’t want to spend the rest of her career with two feet in the past. Feeling music should be a living thing, she resolved to focus on works from the 20th and 21st centuries – a philosophy reflected in the repertoire she will play in her series of Irish performances this month, including pieces by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, the Berlin-based electronic musician Nils Frahm, and Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who died in 2018. (The compositions likewise feature on Samuelsen’s forthcoming album, Life.)
“I was probably the rebel in the class,” she says. “I was not interested in going down the same rabbit hole as all the others. I wanted to do things differently. So I tried experimenting with other types of musicians. I listened to different music. I was very much the nonclassical girl in that classical class.”
‘Our mother had a background playing the piano, but not professionally. She was, like, you give a kid a football; she gave us an instrument’
Her Irish tour will also showcase material by the German-British composer Max Richter, with whom she shared a stage at the All Together Now festival, in Waterford, in 2023. Collaborating with Richter on his reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Samuelsen was a force of nature; her energy was reciprocated by an enthusiastic audience.
“A string broke,” she says of All Together Now. “I managed to run off and change that rather quickly. That was a new type of experience. For both Max and I, it was the highest decibel level we’ve ever had in any performance.”
Samuelsen adores Richter’s “Recomposed” Four Seasons, feeling it true to Vivaldi’s spirit, while refusing to be overawed by it. She looks forward to revisiting the piece at Kilkenny Arts Festival on August 18th, accompanied by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
“He’s kept the essence enough for people to recognise what it is. At the same time, he’s transformed it or adapted it into today’s music,” she says. “His musical language resonates well with my playing. I feel at home in his music. [He has taken] that famous and in many ways tiresome piece – because it’s played in every elevator in the hotel in a part of this world – and given it a fresh, up-to-date bang. A fresh sound, which is fantastic.”
Samuelsen’s childhood reads like something from a fairy tale. She grew up in rural Norway, the child of bohemian parents who nurtured her interest in music while never putting her under pressure to excel. Her older brother, Håkon, is a highly regarded cellist, and they have always had a particularly special bond, having come of age in the rarefied world of elite classical music.
“It was the two of us. We were in the countryside in Norway, out in nature. It was the farm and the forest and the two musical instruments. He was my brother, I was his little sister. He played the cello, I played the violin. It was like playing ball back and forth. It helped to have someone else in the house playing also.”
As with any siblings, there was an element of rivalry to the relationship – though they were ultimately supportive of one another. “We inspired each other. If there was partly a competition in there, it was more an inspirational competition.”
It was “not the typical classical-music family at all”, Samuelsen says. “My father was running the farm and some agricultural companies. Our mother had a background playing the piano, but not professionally. She was, like, you give a kid a football; she gave us an instrument. There was no ‘Mozart pressure’ on there.”
She and her brother were united in wanting to approach classical music as a modern art form. This led them to collaborate with James Horner, the film composer best known for writing My Heart Will Go On, from Titanic. He died in a plane crash, aged 61, in 2015. Seven months before that, in November 2014, the Samuelsens worked with him on the concerto Pas de Deux, his first classical piece since the 1980s.
“We got to know him 2009-2010-ish. Five years before he passed. We grew close quickly. We met a lot of times. He was a fantastic, humble, hard-working person. I sensed the reason he wanted to write a piece of music for us was to have an escape from writing for the screen under directors. It was a free space for him. I feel immensely grateful that I got to meet him and that I got to know him for those years. When you look back [on his early years], his language was experimental and new. It is an interesting journey listening from early in his career to where he found that soundscape of his.”
In Kilkenny she will also play Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis II, a hypnotic piece by one of the fathers of modern minimalism.
‘Philip Glass coming with his music and trying to enter into the core classical-music world has also not been easy. For a long time he struggled to be accepted’
“Listening to Philip Glass, you’re zoning into its own world. I’m in a free space: I find it inspiring. I feel at home in that musical language. It’s hard to describe why – it cannot be easy writing good, minimalistic music. Many try. It falls through. It is not that good.”
She regards Glass as a kindred outsider. He remains a divisive figure to some who struggled for acceptance early in his career. (In the 1970s, he famously got by through operating a furniture-removal business with his fellow composer Steve Reich.)
“Philip Glass coming with his music and trying to enter into the core classical-music world has also not been easy. For a long time he struggled to be accepted. His violin concerto – there are major professional orchestras that don’t want to play it. When you have that over the years, it must be a hit in the face. He’s kept going. It makes you humble. I don’t know him well personally. He keeps producing fantastic music – still now, reaching 90.”
Glass is intimidating to play, Samuelsen says. His music is ever-repeating yet with subtle changes ‐ much like life itself, which is perhaps why his music touches listeners so deeply. “It is extremely challenging. His violin concerto is – excuse my French – shit hard.”
Has she watched Tár, in which Cate Blanchett plays a conductor whose musical genius is matched by her talent for ruffling feathers? Laughing, Samuelsen says that people ask her about Tár all the time.
“I haven’t seen it. So many people ask me if I have, but I haven’t. I admire Cate Blanchett – I love her so much. I’m a bit reluctant to look at conductors movies and also violin playing – where the main character is a violinist. Some people say I should see it and some people say I shouldn’t.”
Blanchett’s Lydia Tár is a tricky prospect whose defining quality is her inability to get along with others. Samuelsen is the opposite. She is a performer who wears her talent lightly while embracing the daunting challenge of making classical music fun and accessible. “It’s been my mission to try to explore music and to find a different audience,” she says. “It is one of the biggest motivations for me.”
Mari Samuelsen performs at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, August 16th, and at Kilkenny Arts Festival on Saturday, August 17th, and Sunday, August 18th. Her album Life is released on Friday, August 23rd
