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Mari Samuelsen’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album sees a bold new curation of dynamic and original music dedicated and influenced by life and light. LYS – Norwegian for “Light” – presents music by thirteen female composers, from Hildegard von Bingen to Hildur Guðnadóttir, combining specially commissioned works with new arrangements of existing pieces. The fourteen tracks are woven together to create a meditative, and energising playlist on this life-giving phenomenon. The Norwegian violinist’s eclectic programme moves through light’s infinitely subtle qualities to reveal a musical world of boundless shades of emotion and expression. LYS spans a breadth of styles that mirrors Mari’s openness to music from a multitude of genres and her wholehearted advocacy of new work. It embraces everything from a moving arrangement of the Beyoncé hit "Halo" to music by twelfth-century Benedictine philosopher, mystic and visionary Hildegard of Bingen; from the transcendent stillness of Hania Rani’s "La Luce" and the melancholy sounds of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s "Bær" to the laser-like precision of Anna Meredith’s "Midi" and Laura Masotto’s charming "Sol Levante". “We humans have so many impressions of light, what light feels like, in good and bad times. I hope that speaks through the music on this album. We instinctively sense the way light affects our feelings, and the influence on our being of dark light, of ‘negative’ light, of the light people talk about just before they die or the ugly light we see from a hospital bed, of shocking laser light and so many other kinds of artificial and natural light. Then you have extreme sunlight, burning down, leaving the land dry and parched. Maybe it’s to do with living in the North or simply with getting older, but these varieties of light touch me now more deeply than ever. All of this was turning over in my mind before I started thinking about who could write the pieces.” - Mari Samuelsen