{"id":5230,"date":"2019-11-15T11:50:20","date_gmt":"2019-11-15T10:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pureaudiorecordings.com\/?post_type=product&p=5230"},"modified":"2026-04-30T18:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T16:30:15","slug":"iceland-symphony-orchestra-concurrence","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/pureaudiorecordings.com\/en\/product\/iceland-symphony-orchestra-concurrence\/","title":{"rendered":"Iceland Symphony Orchestra – Concurrence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can you hear a country in its music? I posed that question only a few years ago, while contemplating the five recent
\norchestral works by leading young Icelandic composers that comprised Recurrence, the previous volume of this invaluable, illuminating Sono Luminus<\/a> series. Pondering those pieces with a visit to Iceland still vivid in my mind\u2019s eye, I likened aspects of the music at hand to elements of land and sky, climate and atmosphere\u2014an approach not without merit, but surely not the sole dimension worth contemplating.<\/p>\n

Two of the composers featured on that previous CD are also present in this second collection, Concurrence. Hearing Anna Thorvaldsdottir<\/a>\u2019s Metacosmos and Mar\u00eda Huld Markan Sigf\u00fasd\u00f3ttir\u2019s Oceans in close proximity, it\u2019s hard not to consider once more the natural features of Iceland. But before you decide to approach these disparate works as paintings in sound, listen again for aspects that distinctly evoke more human dimensions\u2028.<\/p>\n

Thorvaldsdottir, advising performers on how to approach Metacosmos, describes her music as \u201can ecosystem of materials that are carried from one performer \u2013 or performers \u2013 to the next throughout the process of the work.\u201d The piece isn\u2019t meant to depict some specific vista, but rather to compel its participants \u2013 listeners included \u2013 to contemplate the myriad interrelations that bind us together, in space and through time. Oceans, with its gently gliding movements and ravishing plays of light and color, conjures visions of the natural world. But there\u2019s also something ineffably human, emotional, and personal in its cinematic swells and haunting suspensions. In both pieces, despite their markedly different aspects and approaches, the sensation of a beating heart is at some point inescapable.<\/p>\n

Ideas of human presence, interrelationship, and community come to the fore in works by Haukur T\u00f3masson and P\u00e1ll Ragnar P\u00e1lsson. Each is a concerto \u2013 one in name; both in function and spirit \u2013 yet in neither do we hear emphasized the \u201cindividual acting within (or railing against) society\u201d dialectic encountered commonly in the historic genre.<\/p>\n

In T\u00f3masson\u2019s Piano Concerto No. 2, the soloist is first among equals, a frolicsome force in continual conversation with lively choruses of counterparts, never overshadowed but also rarely isolated. The solo cello is more prominent, perhaps, in P\u00e1lsson\u2019s Quake, but not in the sense of a single orator foregrounded against a complementary background. Rather, amid the work\u2019s deliberate, effective tectonic judders and jolts, the soloist might well be… well, us, responding with panic and adroitness to keep pace with the rumbling, mysterious tumult all around.<\/p>\n

Concurrence, then, points out something fundamental about Icelandic music. Works like those presented here, in magnificent performances by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra<\/a>, are not merely illustrative of a fascinating, singular ecosystem, but also evoke the relationships that bond this island- nation\u2019s inhabitants to the land, its sky, its weather\u2014and to one another. \u2013 Steve Smith<\/p>\n