She has recently finished a UK tour with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with whom she has been composer in residence since 2018. In the UK alone, she picked up an Ivors Composer Award for Catamorphosis in December 2021, has had a portrait concert at the Wigmore Hall and a major world premiere at the BBC Proms. And it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which Thorvaldsdottir is in demand. The studio has the feeling of a sanctuary: as distant from the buzz of a concert hall as it is from Iceland. For me, space means not too much clutter – as few things as possible.” I think of all the performers in an orchestra, all these instruments, like one organism “I need a lot of sensory stillness when I’m working,” Thorvaldsdottir explains. Only a closed pad of large-format manuscript paper on the desk betrays the fact that the room is used. She slides the door shut behind us “in case somebody gets the idea to mow their lawn”, as I marvel at the ultra-stylish emptiness. Her composing room is a light-filled studio installed in the neatly kept garden. Thorvaldsdottir and her philosopher husband have been based here since 2017. It’s a sunny spring day and the lush and rolling surrounding countryside couldn’t look more English. Thorvaldsdottir herself has described Iceland’s mountains and oceans as the “ soundtrack to life”.Įven in rural Surrey? “My roots always resonate strongly, no matter where I’m located,” she insists, pouring me a cup of tea from a large, cosy-clad pot. Listening to the mysterious tappings, rustlings and barely-there sonorities that open Dreaming (2010), the dizzying slithers and monolithic bass intrusions that punctuate Metacosmos (2017), or the viscera-quaking climaxes of Catamorphosis (2021), it’s hard to resist the idea that Iceland’s stark, volcanic landscape has not only shaped these scores but also still lurks within them. Her compositions attract a particular kind of awed rhetoric: “ glacial movement”, “ slowly shifting masses of sound”, “ humbling vastness”. In a world where orchestral music on the largest scale is still an overwhelmingly male-authored affair, the 45-year-old’s commitment to vast symphonic forces is all the more striking. The list of orchestras that have commissioned her – among them the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – reads like a Who’s Who of classical music today. Although her back catalogue is large and varied, it’s her orchestral works that have generated the most excitement and that form the core of her output. Over the past 15 years, Anna Thorvaldsdottir has established herself as a leading voice in contemporary music.
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