Following a commission by the Orchestre national de Belgique to write a piece on the theme of the First World War, Benoît Mernier, with whom we started a collaboration in 2013 for his opera La Dispute, has completed his first concerto for violin.

For this work, the composer was inspired by numerous literary texts by writers of the period, Guillaume Apollinaire and Stefan Zweig, as well as current novelists such as Laurent Gaudé. The two movements of his piece take their names from Apollinaire’s poetry. The first movement, entitled Entends la terre véhémente, a line from the poem Désir, has a sombre, agitated mood suggesting the horror and barbarity of the war. La grâce exilée, the title for the second movement, is the name of a poem about the unlikely and enduring hope of soldiers during wartime. Benoît Mernier speaks to us about his inspiration, and his methods for composing this piece, which will be premiered on the 12th, 13th and 14th February 2015, in Brussels, Liège and Lille respectively.