Iceland

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…

Anyone familiar with Björk’s album Utopia – my Best Album of 2017 – will be aware of the ensemble of flutes that features prominently in most of its tracks. Seven of those flautists, Áshildur Haraldsdóttir, Berglind María Tómasdóttir, Björg Brjánsdóttir, Dagný Marinósdóttir, Sólveig Magnúsdóttir, Steinunn Vala Pálsdóttir and Þuríður Jónsdóttir,…

Two years have passed since the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s previous series of albums, Recurrence, Concurrence, Occurrence, and their latest release, Atmospheriques Vol. I, is the start of a new series. As before, the orchestra is conducted by Daníel Bjarnasson, and the emphasis is again on Icelandic composers, though here they’re…

It’s been interesting to compare and contrast three recent releases all of which feature drone at the core of their musical language. (The music is long, so i’m going to keep this quite short.) Drone music tends to operate in one of two ways: either by establishing a literal fundamental,…

i headed up the M5 to Birmingham last Sunday for a concert given by the CBSO Youth Orchestra at Symphony Hall. For many people in the audience, i suppose the highlight would have been two works by Berlioz: the concert opened with the Roman Carnival Overture and closed with the…

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,…

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,…

While it’s normal to feel a sense of familiarity returning to a festival year after year, it was stronger than usual at the 2023 Dark Music Days in Reykjavík since it was only 10 months since last year’s festival, which had been delayed due to the pandemic. It also served…

Over the last few years i’ve been more and more deeply impressed by the music of Icelandic composer and performer Bára Gísladóttir. First contact was at the Dark Music Days in 2020, when i saw her in action with Skúli Sverrisson, forming a complex double bass / electric bass soundworld…

The relationship between Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s music and nature has always been, to put it mildly, complicated. Far from being a composer merely setting out (as far too many have claimed far too often) to evoke the wildness of her native Iceland, Thorvaldsdottir has tended to be much more concerned with…

Last night’s Prom concert included the first of this year’s crop of premières. The Fact of the Matter is a 16-minute response to the current state of the world by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. In the pre-concert discussion, she spoke about the divisions between people, and the feeling that “we’re…

As i mentioned previously, the majority of the music i heard at this year’s Dark Music Days fell somewhere between emotional allusion and full-on abstraction. In many ways it was the most abstract music that made some of the strongest and most long-lasting impressions, primarily because of the composers’ focus…

Postponed from its usual position in late January to early March due to last-minute Covid restriction shenanigans, Iceland’s Dark Music Days festival was therefore not quite so dark as usual. All the same, it was hardly the Light Music Days, and in any case Mother Nature was seemingly more determined…

Among the plethora of releases i’ve received in recent times there’s been a number of especially noteworthy items, either in the form of sizeable box sets or otherwise ‘unusual’ editions, so throughout the course of this month, alongside other things, i’ll be exploring some of them. Surely the strangest (and,…

One of my recurring trains of thought during HCMF 2021 was concerned with the notion of continuity. This was, very simply, due to the fact that all of the best things i heard at the festival had an incredibly clear, logical sense running through them that, regardless of their inner…

The other recent release of Icelandic music that i’ve been spending time with lately is Ethereality, by flautist Berglind María Tómasdóttir (whose Icelandic Flute Music album i explored at the start of the year). When writing about Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma i commented on the way the distinction between the different…

i’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately with two interesting recent releases of Icelandic music. The first is a short album (an EP really) featuring a string quartet by Anna Thorvaldsdottir titled Enigma. The first thing that struck me, long before actually listening to the music, is that it’s…

The Sono Luminus label’s ongoing commitment to Icelandic music continues with Moonbow, a new album featuring five works by Gunnar Andreas Kristinsson. Hitherto, my only contact with Gunnar’s music has been via his 2013 release Patterns, showcasing a variety of his earlier output for piano and organ. That album had…

Early last year, before life on earth tilted over into abject abnormality, i experienced a performance at the Dark Music Days in Reykjavík that, in hindsight, i perhaps summed up a little too succinctly. On the one hand, it was completely true when i wrote, of the performance given by…

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:…