Iceland
Tim Cumming
Silken ambience is the name of the game on this set from Icelandic composer-producer Olafur Arnalds and dreampop singer Talos, aka Eoin French, who tragically died in August last year, aged 36. Arnalds completed the album after his death.Talos' high, otherworldly voice is the dominant signature, from the opening title track with its heavy swell of strings at the high points, through to the spare piano and voice passages of “Bedrock”, a slow, melancholy piano ballad bathed in shimmering reverb and a chorus of voices. Talos’ delicate lone voice over Arnalds’ spare piano lines draws you in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic day in Rúnar Rúnarsson’s romantic tragedy, a Prix Un Certain Regard contender at last year’s Cannes.It starts with Una (Elín Hall) high on love with fellow Reykjavik art student Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), wandering the shoreline together at dusk then comfortably falling into bed. Diddi just has to head west the next morning to dump hometown girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), then life together can officially begin. When a catastrophic explosion destroys that future, Una is left secretly bereft as the nation and Klara mourn. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Víkingur Ólafsson had something to prove at the Wigmore Hall. And prove it he did, even if, this time, his Goldberg Variations left a few features of Bach’s inexhaustible keyboard panorama at the edge of his pianistic picture. The much-loved Icelandic chart-topper had promised Beethoven’s final three sonatas for this concert. His last-minute reversion to the familiar Goldbergs – which he played on 88 occasions around the world last season after a supremely successful DG recording – had disappointed a portion of his vast fan-base. Besides, the prodigious newcomer Yunchan Lim had just performed Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Don’t take a piss in the house of a woman you have made a widow.” The mixture of earthy comedy and tragic pain in this piece of parental advice is typical of the tone of Richard Bean’s Reykjavik, his new work play which explores the lives of the Hull trawlermen of the mid-1970s.As its title suggests, the story revisits the long-lost world of fishing in Arctic waters, and an industry which Bean also explored in his 2003 play, Under the Whaleback, which premiered at the Royal Court. Now a regular at the Hampstead Theatre, his new work has the distinct feeling of a throwback not only to his own Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I feel ashamed because I couldn’t become the man that you always hoped I’d become.” The line is repeated during “Father,” The Art of the Lie’s third track. After this, there’s “Mother and Son,” “Daddy” and the allusive “The Child Catcher”. Parent-child relations, from either perspective, are key to John Grant’s sixth solo album. Specifically, how these have rippled through his life to form his present-day self.The US-born though now Iceland national’s follow-up to 2021’s Boy from Michigan is not just about interpreting growing up in a context which would not accept him as gay. The scope is Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hilmar Oddsson’s award-winning film Driving Mum is pitch-perfect. Jon has spent the last 30 years looking after his domineering mother. There they sit, side by side, in a remote cottage on Iceland’s western fjords, knitting jumpers to sell to the neighbourhood co-op. And as they work, their skeins of wool become entwined – a gentle reminder of how inextricably enmeshed their lives have become.Now, though, Mamma is planning to die and she makes her son promise that he will take her back to her distant village for burial. But she also wants to be photographed at Gullfoss, a beauty spot famous Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
An impressive performance by Samuel West as one of two warring hams stuck on-set in a trailer over a not-so-dormant volcano in Iceland, endlessly waiting to shoot their scene and go home, tended by a young runner whose woke values soon clash with their antediluvian ones...This Park Theatre debut sounds like the makings of a decent farce, with maybe a nod to Beckett. But Adrian Edmonson’s and Nigel Planer’s It’s Headed Straight Towards Us has ended up an incompletely digested mix of digs at the acting world and Young Ones-y excess. The action begins in blackout with what sound like Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s easy to take Sigur Rós’s emotive force for granted. So ubiquitous has their 2005 “Hoppípolla” been on everything from talent shows to apocalyptic environmental collapse documentaries to lyrical scenes of birds in flight that it became the archetypal tear-jerking music of the modern era. Everything about the band was designed with weapons-grade effectiveness for omniemotional impact.Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson’s voice is androgynous, and his made up “Hopelandic” language makes it seem like he’s singing folk songs of all cultures and none – almost as if he’s inhabiting a shared Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iceland’s soul lies in its interior, a forbidding heartland which overwhelms 19th century Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) on his ill-considered posting to this colonial backwater.Director Hlynur Pálmason showed his talent for snapping unbending male psyches in a country of physical extremes in A White, White Day, a film as visceral as Scorsese in its riven machismo, Malick-like in its vaporous, uncanny landscapes, and wholly Icelandic in its saga-resembling trials and consequences.Simmering masculine conflict sharpens the brew here too, though both films are laced with humour. The Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, Elgar: Introduction and Allegro etc Sinfonia of London/John Wilson (Chandos)John Wilson has done it again! He is, at breakneck speed, building an extraordinary catalogue of recordings with his supergroup, the Sinfonia of London, which is – particularly in the realm of British string orchestra music – setting the pace both in terms of revelatory performances of canonic works and disinterred forgotten gems. Into that latter category must go last year’s wonderful John Ireland survey, and likewise the Berkeley and Bliss from 2021’ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Proper music tells stories just about itself, the stern pedagogues insist; it doesn’t (or anyway shouldn’t) paint descriptive pictures of places and people. Well, maybe not – but it was hard to banish all thoughts of geography, even of biography, at the Proms as the BBC Philharmonic under Eva Ollikainen travelled from Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s chthonic Iceland to Sibelius’s composite Italy-Finland by way of the intensely subjective journey embodied in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Kian Soltani – Austrian-born with Iranian heritage, and something of a cross-cultural voyager himself – was the soloist in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white marvel with only two protagonists. (Cinematographer Jarin Blatschke has worked on all Eggers’s films, including his first, The Witch, as has costume designer Linda Muir).But similarities end there, and if you wince occasionally at the violence in The Lighthouse, which includes being buried alive, attacks by a deranged supernatural seagull and Read more ...