Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Eva Ollikainen – Bára Gísladóttir: Orchestral Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 46:32 minutes | 1,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dacapo
Bára Gísladóttir (b. 1989) considers sounds, instruments and ensembles as living organisms. In VAPE, Hringla and COR, the Icelandic composer and double bassist engages with the largest musical organism of all: the symphony orchestra. Inspired by death metal or techno as much as by Scelsi or Penderecki, the foreboding atmosphere of her music is cut through with irony, puns and black humour. After all, organisms themselves – especially human bodies – contain the potential for both comic excess and self-annihilation. In these three works we follow Gísladóttir’s fascination with language and coincidence; we hear an uncompromising interrogation of the body’s excesses and ailments; and, most of all, we see life, vaporous and between states, neither dark nor light.
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Daníel Bjarnason – A Prayer To The Dynamo / Suites from Sicario & The Theory of Everything (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:46 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
Deutsche Grammophon is proud to release the world premiere recording of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s A Prayer to the Dynamo. This major orchestral work was inspired in general by the composer’s fascination with technology, and in particular by field recordings he made at Iceland’s Elliðaár power plant and the writings of Henry Adams.
It is paired on this new album with two suites compiled and arranged by the composer from existing material drawn from his Academy Award-nominated scores for Sicario and The Theory of Everything, also recorded here for the first time.
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Rumon Gamba, Iceland Symphony Orchestra – Wirén: Symphony No. 3, Serenade for Strings, Sinfonetta & Divertimento (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:14 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
No, no: we would never suggest that the music of the Swedish composer Dag Wirén (1905-1986) was in the slightest bit avant-garde. On the contrary, he always strove to write music which, while certainly novel, made for pleasant listening, without either dogma, or pedagogy, or a particular method. His oeuvre, more remarkable for its quality than its quantity, contains five symphonies, of which the Third from 1944 is presented here, and above all the renowned Divertimento for strings from 1957, in which one can discern the legacy of Grieg or Dvořák just as much as Honegger, whom Wirén venerated, or other musicians from the Group of Six; or indeed Shostakovitch in his more wily moments. The writing shares more than a few family resemblances with Jean Françaix, in its impeccable harmonic, thematic and architectural conceptions, all while retaining its light and transparent spirit. During his lifetime, his rejection of the avant-garde was a black mark against his name; but thirty years on from his death, this kind of consideration is no longer relevant. We can finally rediscover Wirén for what he is: an excellent composer. To cut a long story short, it was he who wrote the score to Absent Friend which was Sweden’s entry for the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest – which was won by France Gall, under the flag of Luxembourg, and not of France, as it happens – Absent Friend was neither strictly pop, nor variety, but a piece of pure classical romance, a tragic waltz sung by a truly great operatic baritone, Ingvar Wixell, accompanied by an exclusively classical orchestra, without drums or anything of the sort!
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra & Eva Ollikainen – Anna Thorvaldsdottir: ARCHORA – AIŌN (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:01:49 minutes | 1,95 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sono Luminus
The core inspiration behind ARCHORA centres around the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm – a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow – and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra & Daníel Bjarnason – ATMOSPHERIQUES Vol. I (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 58:55 minutes | 1,87 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sono Luminus
At the risk of getting doxxed by my musician colleagues, I’m going to divulge a dark truth about classical music: it’s never as captivating or molecule-altering for anyone as it is for us on stage. Which is why I often find classical records, especially those of the orchestral persuasion, so underwhelming. So not… immediate. Which is why I am approaching zealot status in my admiration for Sono Luminus and the way in which it submerges listeners within reach of the Atlantis that is the on-stage experience. Which is why, save for live performance, the often inimitable new-music originating in, or in proximity to, Iceland (homeland to an unreasonable percentage of the composers living rent-free in my headphones for more than a decade) has found it’s most ardent advocate and most clarion amplifier in Winchester, Virginia. Certainly it’s exceptional national orchestra has. Despite a bewildering insistence by journalists to characterize music written by those with Icelandic surnames as a monolith, the entries on this tracklist are as singular as hand blown glass. The inclusion of American sonic clairvoyant Missy Mazzoli is a helpful geographic foil here, but there is one element fusing all of these inventions: Your person is about to feel minuscule or massive, by contrast to – or motivated by – these sounds. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is often intimidatingly cyclopean, and Catamorphosis at times mimics the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft- ian deities, but it simultaneously introduces an iridescent hope I have not encountered before in her music. Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) catapults us from one end of a pulsing solar system to the other while Daníel Bjarnason’s From Space I Saw Earth improbably stretches perspective from earth to the moon and back, seeming somehow both terrestrial and paranormal within a single phrase. Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir’s Clockworking bridges a similar expanse, coexisting within the measurable realm of time-keeping… and the immeasurable realm of what occurs as the seconds tick by. Is Bára Gísladóttir’s ÓS gasping in air, or desperately exhaling? Whatever your observation, and as with every waypoint on this illusory itinerary, the answer is likely: both.
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Rumon Gamba – Icelandic Works for the Stage (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:20 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Páll Ísólfsson was the first director of the Reykjavík Music School, which opened in 1930. Like other musicians, he was forced by the lack of opportunity in Iceland to study abroad but, unlike others, he was able to return and work as the Organist at Reykjavík Cathedral to support his activities as a composer. His music for the early Ibsen play The Feast at Solhaug, performed in 1943 in Norwegian on Norway’s National day, was his theatrical début. This was followed in 1945 by the more ambitious score for Úr Myndabók Jónasar Hallgrímssonar.
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Laufey & Iceland Symphony Orchestra – A Night At The Symphony (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 50:56 minutes | 613 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Laufey
Laufey has confirmed new concert album ‘A Night At The Symphony’.
The rising force linked with Iceland Symphony Orchestra for two special nights in Rekyjavik last year, taking over the historic Harpa Concert Hall. The concerts offered a lush, widescreen adaptation of her work, as well as allowing Laufey to reinterpret some long-time favourites.
The project boasted material from her excellent debut album ‘Everything I Know About Love’, plus her 2021 EP ‘Typical Of Me’, as well as material from Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington, Cole Porter, and Icelandic jazz artist Elly Vilhjálm.
Out on March 2nd, it’s trailed – somewhat aptly – by a dulcet rendition of ‘Valentine’.
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra & Daniel Bjarnason – Occurrence (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:10:44 minutes | 2,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sono Luminus
“Occurrence is the third, and at least for now the last, in a hugely illuminating series devoted to works by contemporary Icelandic composers, as performed by Iceland’s 70-year-old national orchestra. Speaking for myself – and surely for many others, as well – the series has been a milestone project, one that any conscientious collector of symphonic music simply must have on the shelf. Across three CDs now, Sono Luminus has capitalized shrewdly on swelling global interest in the music of Daníel Bjarnason and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, using their works as a means by which to introduce seven more composers with original, substantial voices.
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Yan Pascal Tortelier, Iceland Symphony Orchestra – Gounod: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:47 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
After winning the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand in 1839 and spending two years in Rome, Gounod should have gone on to study in Germany, but he managed in 1842 to persuade the authorities that he should remain in Rome to work on a symphony. In 1843 he visited Mendelssohn who (while trying to dissuade him from wasting his time on Goethe’s Faust!) urged him to write another symphony. We do not know how much of the First Symphony Gounod had completed by then, but it is not surprising that Mendelssohn figures as one of the key influences on both symphonies. After performances of individual movements in 1855, premieres were given of the First on 4 March that year and of the Second on 13 February 1856. Yan Pascal Tortelier and his Iceland Symphony Orchestra demonstrate outstanding precision and musicality in these unjustly neglected works.
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra & Rumon Gamba – d’Indy: Poème des Rivages & Symphony No. 1 (2011/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:48 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
D’Indy was a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, and a pupil of César Franck. Fauré described him as ‘The Samson of Music’ for his multifarious and generous-minded work as a composer, conductor, educator, and propagandist who greatly strengthened French musical culture. With a style essentially eclectic and strongly influenced above all by Beethoven and Wagner, d’Indy particularly excelled in orchestral composition. He drew particular inspiration from his native region in southern France, and formed a body of post-romantic works richly orchestrated, often inflected with folk-like melodies, and employing Franck’s well-known ‘cyclic method’.
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