Little Letter to Olly

The composer and conductor Oliver Knussen (1952 - 2018) was loved by many companions for his generosity and musical intellect. To Detlev Glanert, whose works he loved to perform, he was a friend and one of his ‘personal heroes’. By his own admission, he learned attention to detail from ‘Olly', with whom he worked at Tanglewood as early as 1986.

If Glanert's Trumpet Concerto, composed in 2018, is the large-scale symphonic homage to his role model, the solo ‘Little Letter to Olly’ does the same in a small format. Two elegiac adagio sections frame a boisterous presto with all kinds of virtuoso tricks. The 'Letter without Words' owes its existence to a suggestion by the cellist Anssi Karttunen, who asked for commemorative pieces for Knussen's 70th birthday from a number of composers and premiered them at the Aldeburgh Festival 2022.