Portrait albums can be a double-edged sword. They’re obviously a great opportunity to present a showcase of someone’s work. Hardly surprising, then, that for many composers, securing that first album devoted to their music is regarded as an important, even vital step on the path toward something that might approximate success. Yet they inevitably also carry with them a connotation of manifesto, a statement of intent. By implication such albums unavoidably declare, “This is who I am; This is what I do”, and that’s very revealing. Depending on the composer, this can lay bare potential limitations to their musical language or range of creativity and imagination. i’ve lost track of the number of times i’ve been immersed in a portrait disc and, even if i’ve enjoyed it, have come out the other side either uncertain of how much more ploughing that particular furrow can feasibly take (as with Aaron Cassidy’s The Crutch of Memory – which remains nonetheless a fantastic album), or disappointed by the composer’s narrow range of invention (such as Helen Grime’s Night Songs, or more recently, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s shockingly abysmal ARCHORA / AIŌN).
So it’s been an interesting experience spending time with two new portrait albums of music by Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir. Gísladóttir is definitely no stranger to 5:4, and longer-term readers will know how highly i regard her work: previous releases have consistently featured in my Best Albums of the Year lists, taking the top spot in 2022 with her dazzling multi-flute epic VÍDDIR. What’s been especially interesting about these two new albums is that they don’t so much build on that impressive track record but, to an extent, actually undermine it.
Growl Power picks up the baton from VÍDDIR and runs with it, featuring four flute-based works all composed in 2022, performed by Björg Brjánsdóttir (one of the soloists in flute ensemble viibra, whom i wrote about a few months back). It’s very egalitarian, with one work respectively for bass flute, alto flute, flute and piccolo, two of which also include electronics. Though different in setup, there are strong behavioural similarities between the pieces. Stars with Shadows, the piccolo piece, is a good examplar of this, featuring high sustained tones that are broken up with anything from minimal fluctuations to more wild, playful activity. At times, Brjánsdóttir’s voice gets involved too, as if straining to force extra power through the instrument. At nine minutes in length, this basic behaviour feels very overworked, and this is a trait of much of the music contained on both these albums. GLÓÐ|STELPA, for flute, is very similar, again breaking up a series of sustained tones with a palette of articulations, including trills, microtonal undulations and more extensively elaborate flights of fancy. Again Brjánsdóttir gets vocally involved, though here Gísladóttir ups the ante and really makes her lose her shit entirely (with echoes of similar passages in VÍDDIR). Again lasting nine minutes, while there’s something heroic about Brjánsdóttir’s commitment to the work’s demands, that doesn’t prevent the results from becoming increasingly relentless and tedious, with the aimed-for ferocity cancelling itself out in a display of overblown posturing.
Ever Out After Dark (or blue lady in boring city) for alto flute and electronics is similar again, though it locates the soloist in an electronic droneworld. At times it brings to mind the more evocative drone work of The Hafler Trio in the way Brjánsdóttir plays against (literally and figuratively) the drone, sometimes reinforcing it in unisons or octave doublings, elsewhere challenging it or simply forging her own, oblique trajectory regardless of it. With a 16-minute duration, the behavioural limitations again feel considerable, though the work’s delicate beauty keeps it engaging and, at its best, makes it a seriously mesmeric experience, particularly when Brjánsdóttir begins vocalising around halfway through. The title work, GROWL POWER, for bass flute and electronics, takes a slightly different approach. Again the piece is drone-based, with the voice, flute and electronics intermingling to the extent that they are often indivisible. Again the music is essentially confined to a singular behavioural impulse, but where this comes to feel frustratingly limited in the other three works, here there’s a much greater sense that this impulse is being enacted, with a wider range of expression, through a series of semi-spontaneous, self-similar episodes. Furthermore, the relationship between the music’s components is more interesting. Though intertwined, those components retain autonomy: sustained tones cancel each other out; Brjánsdóttirs voice caterwauls crazily while her instrument remains calm. It’s again true that Gísladóttir’s penchant for trying to elicit extremes end up sounding more ridiculous than genuinely powerful, but the way these outbursts are integrated into the whole is far more convincing.
It should go without saying, but Björg Brjánsdóttir’s performance of these four works is utterly outstanding. i already described her as heroic, but her focused embodiment of what are effectively behavioural studies bestows huge authority, despite the works’ shortcomings. Apropos: i can’t help wondering whether it’s more helpful to regard these four pieces as akin to movements of the same larger work, or alternative ways to articulate the same or similar behavioural traits. Whether that perspective lessens the ennui that sets in in some of these pieces is a judgement call, but the fact these works were composed around the same time perhaps makes treating them as siblings appropriate.
Released in January, Growl Power is available on digital formats only.
In many ways the unchanging behavioural attitude, episodically expressed, heard in Growl Power is dominant throughout the three pieces on the other new disc of Gísladóttir’s music, Orchestral Works. Performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eva Ollikainen, if this album fares a little better, that’s primarily to do with the fact that, though it demonstrates ostensibly the same compositional approach, it’s much more timbrally diverse, plus it exhibits a more tangible use of pitch as a structural element.
Two of the three works, VAPE (2016) and Hringla (2022), i’ve previously encountered and discussed, following their performance at the Dark Music Days in 2023; the third work, COR, dates from 2021, and in the same way as the flute pieces, it perhaps makes some sense to think of these three not as discrete and self-contained but sibling movements of a single, over-arching compositional mindset. It would be simplistic to make the leap to describing this composite perspective as ‘symphonic’ – Gísladóttir’s music may be many things, but symphonic it most certainly isn’t – but heard as a triptych they arguably become something greater than what they are on their own terms.
One of the overriding problems permeating these three pieces is a sense that Gísladóttir wants to eat her cake and have it too. There’s an all too obvious propensity to wildness and extremity being expressed here – an extension of the full force intensity demonstrated in so many of her earlier, particularly electroacoustic, compositions – but it’s consistently held in check, such that the net result, like the flute pieces, is a long-form equilibrium. (i hesitate to describe it as another example of steady statism, but it’s not a million miles away from it; there’s certainly a distinct impression of long-term stasis in at least two of these works.)
i mentioned a more tangible use of pitch, and that usually appears in this music as a form of implied fundamental, gaining that status through being reinforced by octave unisons. In COR, the most dronal of these pieces, the clarity pitch provides is used as a pole of stability in the midst of two things that militate against it: massive surges, where pitch persists (and, it could be argued, is magnified as much as dirtied), and nebulous sequences where pitch is lost. The piece unfolds as an oscillation between these kinds of discrete behavioural certainty, tending to become more messy along the way. It suffers hard from the same problem of self-defeating overload as some of the flute works, with its attempted immensity sounding more and more dull – mere volume – repulsing rather than overwhelming, eventually sounding like Gísladóttir were simply trying to outdo herself.
VAPE and Hringla work better due to being more nuanced and imaginatively articulated. Both, as i’ve previously discussed, have a distinct sonorist inclination, though their modus operandi is essentially the same. Both are engaged in a tension (not unlike that in COR) between clarity and vagueness, which in Hringla is made more interesting due to its dronal aspects being less fixed. There’s also much less sense of mere oscillation, the episodic shifts in behaviour having a real spontaneity to them, always familiar in terms of action, always unexpected inasmuch as we never know what’s going to happen next. As i mentioned following the Dark Music Days performance, Gísladóttir’s putative solo double bass role is entirely redundant, functioning neither as a credible protagonist (or antagonist for that matter) nor as some kind of mouthpiece for the orchestra as a whole. More often than not she’s simply lost or irrelevant in the texture, which is in any case more interesting than what’s coming from her bass. Here, and in the other two pieces, the woodwinds are a mischievous presence, often throwing wilfully dissonant contributions into otherwise relatively pitch-focused passages, though rarely causing their undoing.
Best of all is VAPE which, though once again exhibiting the same tendency to overall behavioural stasis, expresses this in the most exciting way. Unlike much of Gísladóttir’s music, here it makes less sense to speak of louder and softer dynamics than greater and lesser concentration. It’s a piece that seems to be spontaneously slip-sliding around a continuum of textural intensity. Pitch is at its most ambiguous here, with many of the work’s sonic elements being pitchless and / or percussive, becoming the basis for the work’s dense sonoristic textural effects. In some respects, particularly in light of the other orchestral pieces and the four flute works, the lack of detail in VAPE is a relief, allowing us to become genuinely immersed within a disorienting but stable sequence of large-scale structural and textural undulations. As i’ve noted, there are times in these orchestral pieces when the apparent inclination to extremes is fatally undermined by the music’s unwillingness to genuinely let rip, but here the tension created by the persistent sense that everything might explode, but ultimately never does, is highly effective.
So having been deeply and consistently impressed by Bára Gísladóttir’s work over the last few years, it’s genuinely fascinating to hear examples of her work that challenge that consistency, and reveal limitations and handicaps in the way the music plays out. That being said, despite the flaws, this is still a compelling portrait album that testifies, among other things, to the extent of the fire in Gísladóttir’s compositional aspirations. What remains to be heard is the extent to which she can genuinely actualise this in future work.
Orchestral Works is released by Da Capo, and available on CD and digital formats.
[…] recently had cause to remark on the pro / con nature of portrait discs, and here we are again, with a new album of music by […]