Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2023-2024 Season Includes Performances in Over 16 Countries
Photo by Anna Maggý available in high resolution at www.annathorvalds.com/photos
Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2023-2024 Season Includes Landmark Performances by Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Continued Premieres of ARCHORA, Performances in at Least 16 Countries
“Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s natural instrument is the symphony orchestra, but in her hands it is reborn as a natural organism.”
– The Guardian
Double Concert by Iceland Symphony Orchestra in Reykjavik
Led by Chief Conductor Eva Ollikainen
October 5 at Harpa Concert Hall: AIŌN
October 6 at Hallgrímskirkja: METACOSMOS, ARCHORA, Heyr þú oss himnum á, Ad Genua
Information: https://en.sinfonia.is/concerts-tickets/archora-1
Upcoming highlights include ARCHORA performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, on October 14; French premiere by the Orchestre de Paris on January 24 and 25; Swiss premiere by Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne on February 7 and 8; Danish premiere by Aarhus Symphony Orchestra on February 29; and US East Coast premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 18-20
Anna’s major new installation piece METAXIS will be premiered by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at Harpa on June 1, 2024, as part of the opening celebration of the Reykjavík Arts Festival
Plus performances at the Southbank Centre, King’s Place, Beijing Music Festival, and by orchestras including the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Tampere Philharmonic, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and more
Schedule: www.annathorvalds.com/performances
Latest Album Available Now on Sono Luminus: ARCHORA / AIŌN
Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Eva Ollikainen
Press downloads available upon request.
Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (The New York Times) and “riveting” (The Times) sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material – it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow. “Thorvaldsdottir is incapable of writing music that doesn’t immediately transfix an open-eared listener,” reports The New York Times.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2023-2024 season (September 2023 to June 2024) includes performances of her music across at least sixteen countries, including Iceland, England, Ireland, China, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Slovenia. Her current schedule is available on her website and will be updated with additional performances throughout the year.
Up next, Anna’s concert season includes milestone performances on October 5 and 6, 2023 in Reykjavik by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, where Anna is Composer-in-Residence. On October 5, the ISO performs her symphony-scale AIŌN at Harpa Concert Hall, and on October 6, the orchestra presents a portrait concert of her work at Hallgrímskirkja that includes METACOSMOS, ARCHORA, Heyr þú oss himnum á, and Ad Genua, with the Choir of Hallgrímskirkja conducted by Steinar Logi Helgason, and soloist Bryndís Guðjónsdóttir. Both concerts will be led by ISO Chief Conductor Eva Ollikainen.
A major highlight of this season is continued premiere performances of Anna’s latest major orchestral work ARCHORA, from 2022. Of the world premiere, The Guardian reported, “Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is about mass and density, how different planes of sounds collide and combine, and how intricately detailed textures evolve over time. Those qualities make the orchestra the obvious medium for her work, and it has largely been through her sequence of strikingly effective orchestral scores that the Iceland-born composer has become recognised as one of the most distinctive voices in European music today." ARCHORA was commissioned by the BBC Proms and co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and Klangspuren Schwaz, and was premiered in August 2022 at the BBC Proms by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Ollikainen in a concert selected as among The Guardian’s Classical Highlights of 2022.
This season, the Swedish premiere of ARCHORA took place on September 21 and 22, performed by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eva Ollikainen. Upcoming performances include the Manchester premiere by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ollikainen on October 14; the French premiere of the piece by the Orchestre de Paris, a co-commissioner of the work, led by Klaus Mäkelä on January 24 and 25, 2024; the Swiss premiere by the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne conducted by Ollikainen on February 7 and 8; the Danish premiere by the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra led by Ollikainen on February 29; and the US East Coast premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons from April 18-20, 2024.
These performances follow the May 2023 release on Sono Luminus of the ISO’s recording of ARCHORA and AIŌN, conducted by Ollikainen. In April 2023, Sono Luminus also released her major orchestral work CATAMORPHOSIS as part of the album Atmospheriques, conducted by Daníel Bjarnason. With these recordings, all of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s orchestral music is now available on Sono Luminus. The label’s previous releases include METACOSMOS in 2019; AERIALITY, originally released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2014 and re-released in a remastered version on Sono Luminus in 2022; and Dreaming, originally released on a portrait album by Innova Recordings in 2011 and re-released on Sono Luminus in 2020.
This season also brings the world premiere of Anna’s major new installation piece METAXIS by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra on June 1, 2024 at Harpa, part of the opening celebration of the 2024 Reykjavík Arts Festival and of the festival's collaboration with Harpa and the ISO. Anna describes METAXIS as, “an installation for deconstructed orchestra and space.” Audiences will have the unique opportunity to explore the music from different perspectives, as they wander through Harpa’s iconic foyer and feel how their experience of the music changes with every step. The musicians and the electronics will be spread out over the different levels of the building, blending together in myriad ways and creating a unique sound world with innumerable textures. The piece is half an hour in length and will be conducted by Eva Ollikainen.
In addition to the BBC Philharmonic’s performance of ARCHORA mentioned above, highlights of the season in England, where Anna is now based, include the Aurora Orchestra performing Anna’s string octet Illumine on October 8 at Saffron Hall in Saffron Walden and on October 11 at the Southbank Centre in London. Commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Anna writes in her note for the piece that it is, “based on the notion of dawn and the relationship between light and darkness.” Aurora Orchestra will also perform Anna’s chamber piece In the Light of Air on November 25 at King’s Place in London. On April 27, 2024 the City of Birmingham Orchestra will perform Dreaming in a concert conducted by Gergely Madaras at Symphony Hall in Birmingham. Gramophone describes Dreaming as, “an imposing monolith that emerges from silence and recedes back into it, speaking of natural desolation, severe beauty and precarious tectonics in between.”
Anna’s music will also be performed throughout the United States and Canada during the season. In Boston, in addition to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s East Coast premiere of ARCHORA mentioned above, Claire Chase and ensemble will perform Ubique, commissioned by and premiered at Carnegie Hall in May 2023, at Harvard University on October 18. The chamber orchestra A Far Cry will perform Illumine on February 17 and 18, 2024. On March 10, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Spectra at Jordan Hall. In New York, Blackbox Ensemble will perform Anna’s chamber piece Ró at the Noguchi Museum on November 8. On April 8, AXIOM ensemble will perform Hrím for chamber orchestra led by Jeffrey Millarsky at The Juilliard School. On the West Coast, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra conducted by Daniel Stewart will perform METACOSMOS on November 19. METACOSMOS was premiered by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2018 and in Europe by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert in January 2019. The Boston Globe reported, “There is possibly no other composer working today who is so adept at channeling the massive forces of nature, and given a full orchestral sound palette to play with, [Thorvaldsdottir] goes wild. Writing lines that ride the knife edge of order and chaos and giving poetic but direct suggestions to the musicians, she immerses listeners in eerie, irresistible landscapes of sound.” Other performances of Anna’s music will take place across the country in cities including Nashville, TN; Flagstaff, AZ; Boulder, CO; Austin, TX; Juneau, AK, and more. In Canada, CATAMORPHOSIS was performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Otto Tausk, on September 15 and 16, 2023. Additional performances of Anna's work will take place in Montreal.
In addition to the Orchestre de Paris’s and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne’s premieres of ARCHORA mentioned above, European performances include in Germany the Kammerakademie Potsdam Modern Ensemble performing Illumine on October 25, 2023; the Beethoven Orchester Bonn conducted by Dirk Kaftan performing Anna’s major orchestral work CATAMORPHOSIS on October 27; the Philharmonisches Orchester Heidelberg conducted by Cornelius Meister performing METACOSMOS on April 4 and 5, 2024; the Frankfurt Radio Symphony performing METACOSMOS conducted by Alain Altinoglu at Alter Oper in Frankfurt on June 13 and 14; and Aeriality performed by the Pfalzphilharmonie Kaiserslautern conducted by Daniele Squeo on June 16 and 17, 2024. In Switzerland, Aeriality will be performed on January 25, 2024 by Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen, conducted by Modestas Pitrenas. The Danish String Quartet continues touring Anna’s most recent string quartet Rituals, described by The New York Times as an, “entrancing series of permutations in which a set of musical gestures are rearranged like matter,” with performances at the Musikgebouw in Amsterdam on September 16, 2023; at National Concert Hall in Dublin, Ireland on September 28; and at Flagey’s Studio 4 in Brussels on October 13. Additional performances of Anna’s music will take place in Vienna, Austria and Ljubljana, Slovenia.
This autumn in China, Illumine will be performed by the Mahler Foundation Festival Orchestra conducted by John Warner at the Beijing Music Festival on October 13, 2023.
In the Nordic countries, in addition to the Swedish and Danish premieres of ARCHORA and the premiere of METAXIS in Iceland mentioned above, in Denmark on November 15, 2023 the Danish Sinfonietta performs Illumine in Randers. In Sweden, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali performs CATAMORPHOSIS on March 13 and 14, 2024. The Hehku Ensemble performs For it will never return for tenor and harp on May 18 in Gothenburg Concert Hall. On May 30, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra performs METACOSMOS conducted by Fabien Gabel at Malmö Live Concert Hall. In Finland this spring, CATAMORPHOSIS will be performed on April 26 by the Tampere Philharmonic conducted by Matthew Hall and on May 31 by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon in Helsinki. CATAMORPHOSIS, premiered in 2021, was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Of the piece The Times reported, “[Thorvaldsdottir] has carved her own corner in contemporary music by creating symphonic works of sustained brilliance and considerable power from the steady collision, growth and mutation of precisely imagined sounds and textures.”
For more information about Anna Thorvaldsdottir: www.annathorvalds.com/bio