The majority of the concerts at this year’s Dark Music Days were focused on chamber music. The most leftfield of these came courtesy of Trio Isak, in a concert titled ‘Ballet on the Moon’. That title in part derived from the opening piece on the programme, Daníel Bjarnason‘s White Flags,…
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Daníel Bjarnason
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Larger-scale works featured in several Dark Music Days events. One of the toughest to engage with was given by Caput Ensemble, a concert marred by the yawningly awful Polo by Simon Mawhinney, a quarter of an hour’s worth of relentless, faceless, arbitrary blarney. Veronique Vaka‘s Holos was marginally more interesting,…
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One of the first new releases of 2021 to catch my attention is Occurrence featuring the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. According to conductor Daníel Bjarnason, this is “the third and last album of the ISO project” which, if true, is a shame in both a positive and a negative sense. Positive:…
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Released tomorrow is a new album of eight works by Icelandic composers, all of which have been curated by – and in some cases created in collaboration with – cellist and vocalist Gyða Valtýsdóttir. The general tone of these works, all of which are quite brief, is meditative in nature,…
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CD/Digital releases
Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir – Vernacular; Siggi String Quartet – South of the Circle; Iceland Symphony Orchestra – Concurrence
by 5:4In just over a week’s time Iceland’s premier new music festival, the Dark Music Days, will be up and running again, and once again i’ll be heading off to Reykjavík to immerse myself in some of the goings-on. Details about the festival can be found here, and for any UK…
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One of the plagues that continues to afflict most contemporary music festivals is ‘première-itis’, an acute obsession with presenting loudly-trumpeted world premières at the expense of providing opportunities for second, third or indeed nth performances. It was a relief, therefore, that this year’s Dark Music Days (which was otherwise similarly…
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This week i’ll be exploring four new albums of contemporary orchestral music that i’ve recently been spending time with, the first of which turned out to be a surprisingly big disappointment. Last year i was very impressed by Recurrence, a disc put out by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, mainly due…
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CD/Digital releases
New (Nordic) releases: Vilde&Inga, Nordic Affect, Trio Aristos, Iceland Symphony Orchestra
by 5:4There’s been a number of very interesting new releases recently featuring composers and performers from the Nordic countries. At the most unconventional end of the spectrum are violinist Vilde Sandve Alnæs and double bassist Inga Margrete Aas, a Norwegian duo who perform free-improvised music together as Vilde&Inga. Their new album Silfr, released…