April 18-20: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Major Orchestral Work ARCHORA in Boston Premiere Performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Photo by Saga Sigurdardottir available in high resolution at www.annathorvalds.com/photos
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Major Orchestral Work ARCHORA
in Boston Premiere Performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Andris Nelsons
April 18-20, 2024 | Symphony Hall | 301 Massachusetts Ave. | Boston, MA
Tickets & Information
“The energy that inspires the Icelandic composer’s colossus doesn’t feel of this Earth, but rather an internal combustion – we are the sublime composite of everything. Low, bellowing brass and woodwinds drone as flutes carry our light forward. Monumental music that feels rigorously intimate.” – Lars Gotrich, NPR, on ARCHORA
“Thorvaldsdottir’s music partakes of deep, primordial textures and a mysterious sense of structure and flow.” – David Weininger, The Boston Globe, on ARCHORA
First Commercial Recording of ARCHORA is Available Now on Sono Luminus
Chosen as One of the Best Albums of 2023 by NPR, The Boston Globe, & The New York Times
Press downloads available upon request.
Read a Q&A with Anna about ARCHORA from Wise Music Classical
Boston, MA – Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s latest major orchestral work, ARCHORA, will receive its Boston premiere performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons in concerts on April 18 at 7:30pm, April 19 at 1:30pm, and April 20 at 8pm, at Symphony Hall. The program also includes Mozart’s Symphony No. 33 and Brahms’ Violin Concerto with guest soloist Hilary Hahn.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (The New York Times) and “riveting” (The Times) sound world has made her “a leading voice in contemporary music” (The Guardian). 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 in its review of ARCHORA.
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. 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." The premiere was selected as among The Guardian’s Classical Highlights of 2022.
ARCHORA is featured on Anna’s latest portrait album, ARCHORA / AIŌN, which was recorded by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eva Ollikainen and released on the Sono Luminus label. The album was chosen as one of the best of 2023 by The Boston Globe, NPR, and The New York Times. (Press downloads available upon request).
Anna writes of ARCHORA:
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. As with my music generally, the inspiration is not something I am trying to describe through the music as such – it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the piece.
All of Anna’s orchestral music is now available on Sono Luminus. In addition to ARCHORA / AIŌN, in spring 2023 the label released Anna’s major orchestral work CATAMORPHOSIS as part of the album Atmospheriques, conducted by Daníel Bjarnason. Sono Luminus’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.
Anna’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.
More about Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “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, as well as commissions by many of the world’s top orchestras. CATAMORPHOSIS was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko in January 2021, following the orchestra’s European premiere of METACOSMOS with Alan Gilbert in 2019. CATAMORPHOSIS received its UK premiere by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot in June 2022, with the US premiere with the New York Philharmonic and Santtu-Matias Rouvali taking place in January 2023. ARCHORA - the latest addition to Anna’s “ever-growing and ever more essential catalogue of orchestral pieces” (BBC Radio 3) - was premiered at the BBC Proms in August 2022, by the BBC Philharmonic and Eva Ollikainen. The work received its US premiere with the LA Philharmonic and Eva Ollikainen in May 2023. And “while [she] has made the symphony orchestra her own,” according to Gramophone magazine, “her chamber music is cut from the same cloth and somehow sounds with much the same combination of immensity and intimacy.” Anna’s recent string quartet Enigma was recorded and released by Sono Luminus in August 2021, performed by the Spektral Quartet, and was one of the New York Times’s recordings of the year (“a masterly entrance to the genre”). Portrait albums with Anna’s works have appeared on Deutsche Grammophon, Sono Luminus, and Innova.
Anna’s music is widely performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras, ensembles, and arts organizations – such as the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Danish String Quartet, BBC Proms, and Carnegie Hall. Among the many other orchestras and ensembles that have performed her music include the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Quatuor Bozzini, BBC Singers, The Crossing, the Bavarian Radio Choir, Münchener Kammerorchester, Avanti Chamber Ensemble, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Portrait concerts with Anna’s music have been featured at several major venues and music festivals, including Wigmore Hall, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival in NYC, London’s Spitalfields Music Festival, Münchener Kammerorchester’s Nachtmusic der Moderne series, the Composer Portraits Series at NYC’s Miller Theatre, the Leading International Composers series at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra’s Point Festival. Other prominent venues and festivals include the BBC Proms, Aldeburgh Festival, London’s Royal Opera House, Southbank Centre, Lucerne Festival, Tanglewood Music Festival, Darmstadt Summer Course, Pierre Boulez Saal Berlin, ISCM World Music Days, Nordic Music Days, Ultima Festival, Beijing Modern Music Festival, Reykjavik Arts Festival, Tectonics, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Helsinki’s Musica Nova Festival, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.
Anna is currently based in the London area. She regularly teaches and gives presentations on composition, in academic settings, as part of residencies, and in private lessons. Invited lectures and presentations include Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, NYU, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Sibelius Academy, and the Royal Academy of Music in London. Composer-in-Residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra 2018-2023, Anna was in 2023 also in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. She holds a PhD (2011) from the University of California in San Diego.
For more information: www.annathorvalds.com