Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2024-2025 Season Highlights - Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich Creative Chair, Performances in at Least 17 Countries; World Premiere of New Cello Concerto
Photo by Anna Maggy. High resolution photos available here.
Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2024-2025 Season Highlights
2024-2025 Creative Chair of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich
2024-2025 CHANEL Next Prize Winner
World Premiere of New Cello Concerto by Johannes Moser and the San Francisco Symphony in May 2025
Continued Country and Local Premieres of Major Orchestral Works METACOSMOS, AIŌN, CATAMORPHOSIS, ARCHORA
CATAMORPHOSIS Returns to the Berlin Philharmonie in February 2025
Performances in at Least 17 Countries
Forthcoming Album on Sono Luminus: Ubique
Release Date: February 28, 2025
“[Thorvaldsdottir] has carved her own corner in contemporary music by creating symphonic works of sustained brilliance” – The Times
Schedule: www.annathorvalds.com/performances
Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (The New York Times) and striking 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. The Guardian reports, “Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s natural instrument is the symphony orchestra, but in her hands it is reborn as a natural organism.”
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2024-2025 season (September 2024 to June 2025) includes performances of her music across at least seventeen countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Her current schedule is available on her website and will be updated with additional performances throughout the year.
Anna has been appointed the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich’s Creative Chair for the 2024-2025 season. Since 2015, the orchestra has invited a composer to hold this position each season, including, formerly, Arvo Pärt, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Toshio Hosokawa, among others. From September 2024 to June 2025, a wide variety of Anna’s music will be performed, ranging from string quartets to large orchestral pieces. The season-opening concerts in September featured ARCHORA, conducted by music director Paavo Järvi. Two of Anna’s orchestral works will receive their Swiss premieres – CATAMORPHOSIS at the Sonic Matter Festival Zurich conducted by André de Ridder on November 29 and METACOSMOS conducted by Eva Ollikainen on April 3 and 4.
Additionally, Anna continues her two-year period as one of ten CHANEL Next Prize winners. The biennial prize is awarded to ten international contemporary artists who are redefining their chosen discipline. Each artist embodies CHANEL’s mission to advance the new and the next and receives €100,000 in funding, allowing them to fully realize their most ambitious artistic projects. The NEXT Prize was established in 2021 as part of the CHANEL Culture Fund, CHANEL’s global initiative to accelerate the ideas that advance culture, extending the House’s century-long legacy of cultural patronage.
A major highlight of the 2024-2025 concert season is the world premiere of Anna’s new cello concerto by the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Dalia Stasevska from May 15 to 17. Written for Johannes Moser and titled Before we fall, the new concerto is co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, and Odense Symphony Orchestra. Additional country premieres will be announced.
Anna’s other large orchestral works METACOSMOS (2017), AIŌN (2018), CATAMORPHOSIS (2020), and ARCHORA (2022) continue to receive country and local premieres as well as repeat performances throughout the world:
METACOSMOS will be performed at least six times this season, by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ollikainen (October 3); Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tabita Berglund (November 13); Houston Symphony conducted by Berglund (January 24 to 26); Dresdner Philharmonie conducted by Bergland (January 31 and February 2); La Jolla Symphony conducted by Arian Khaefi (March 15 and 16); and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich conducted by Ollikainen (Swiss premiere, April 3 and 4). 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.”
AIŌN received its Finnish premiere in performances by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Tapiola Sinfonietta led by Dalia Stasevska on September 12 and 13. Simultaneously, the piece was performed in Germany on September 13 by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin led by Lee Reynolds. AIŌN was commissioned by Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Of the piece, The New York Times wrote, “Among the many wonders of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music – exquisitely honed timbres, an intricate play of shadow and light – perhaps the most mysterious is the way it can sound so static yet be in a state of constant (if sometimes glacial) change … This craftsmanship – a meticulous fusion of pacing, structure and coloring – is also at work in the three-movement AIŌN … Thorvaldsdottir is incapable of writing music that doesn’t immediately transfix an open-eared listener.”
CATAMORPHOSIS will have its Swiss premiere by the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich conducted by André de Ridder on November 29, with additional performances this season by the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Jamie Martin on January 4 at the Barbican, January 5 at Warwick Arts Centre, and January 6 at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham. As part of the Berliner Philharmoniker's 2025 Biennale, the piece returns to the Berlin Philharmonie, this time performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Nicholas Collon on February 16. It will also be performed this spring by the Berner Symphonieorchester led by Anna Sułkowska-Migoń on April 3 and 4 and by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra led by Ollikainen on May 22. 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 Guardian reported, “Thorvaldsdottir’s impressive new work was detailed and powerful ... Lasting around 20 minutes, it’s a single movement of restrained power, a continuum of shifting, colliding layers of sound, which are minutely detailed in the score yet manage to seem simultaneously massive and delicate as they move from dense chromaticism to moments of almost lucid tonality ... this scrupulously prepared and wonderfully performed premiere showed that it’s a piece that stands entirely on its own feet, creating an utterly convincing musical world.”
ARCHORA was performed by the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich during their season-opening concerts and the start of Anna’s residency as Creative Chair with the orchestra, from September 18 to 20. That same week on September 19, the Odense Symphony Orchestra led by Eva Ollikainen performed the work. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal led by Dalia Stasevska gives the Canadian premiere of ARCHORA on January 22 and 23. 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.
In addition, Anna’s string octet Illumine was performed on tour throughout Australia by the Australian Chamber Orchestra in September, as well as by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra in Oslo on October 15. It will be featured in performances by Boston chamber orchestra A Far Cry on March 28 and 29. 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.”
Anna’s string quartet Enigma will be performed by Ensemble ö! at the Atelier für Kunst und Philosophie in Zürich on October 20, and will receive its German premiere performed by the PULSE string quartet at Galerie Rabus in Bremen on October 27. Of the piece, which was commissioned by Spektral Quartet, Carnegie Hall, and Washington Performing Arts, NPR reported, “Describing Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Enigma – her first string quartet – is not easy, but imagine you’re suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet.” Spektral Quartet’s recording of Enigma on Sono Luminus was named on both NPR’s and The New York Times’ best of 2021 lists.
Anna’s large ensemble piece Aequilibria will be performed by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra at the University of Oslo’s Aula on November 19. Aequilibria was commissioned by BIT20 Ensemble and recorded by International Contemporary Ensemble on Sono Luminus. The Wall Street Journal writes of the piece, “A cello drone gives way to busy, distant-sounding string and wind passages; brass writing moves between ominous, sustained tone, textured buzzing and Wagnerian heft, and a mournful alto flute line hovers briefly over a bleak ensemble texture. Shortly before the piece ends, unexpected percussion bursts and delicate piano tracery push the music toward an eerie landscape – a musical equivalent of magical realism.”
Notable festival performances of Anna’s music this season include Nordic Music Days in Glasgow (October 30) and at the 2025 Ojai Music Festival (June). For her complete performance calendar, visit www.annathorvalds.com/performances.
The 2024-2025 season also brings a new album featuring Anna’s evening-length chamber work Ubique, which will be released worldwide on Sono Luminus on February 28. The 50-minute piece was co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, The Pnea Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, and Kurt Chauviere for Claire Chase’s Claire Chase’s Density project. The world premiere was given in May 2023 at Carnegie Hall, performed by Claire Chase, flutes; Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods, cellos; Cory Smythe, piano; and Levy Lorenzo, live sound. The same musicians have recorded the new album, and will perform its West Coast premiere at the Ojai Festival in California on June 7. Anna writes of the piece, “Ubique lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion. Through a combination of sounds, pitches, and textural nuances, low deep drones envelop lyrical materials and harmonies that breathe in and out of focus throughout the progress of the piece. The flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction — of various kinds and durations — as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure.”
All of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s orchestral music and many of her other works are recorded on the Sono Luminus label, and featured on Apple Music’s Anna Thorvaldsdottir Essentials Playlist.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is frequently performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras, ensembles, and arts organizations, including the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Danish String Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, BBC Proms, and Carnegie Hall. Her “detailed and powerful” (The Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, the Nordic Council, and the UK’s Ivors Academy. Anna was Composer-in-Residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from 2018-2023, and was in 2023 also in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. She holds a PhD from the University of California in San Diego, and is currently based in the London area.
The music of Anna Thorvaldsdottir is published by Chester Music, part of Wise Music Group.
For more information about Anna Thorvaldsdottir: www.annathorvalds.com/bio