For its second season under the leadership of principal conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra offers a wonderfully balanced programme, which features a lot of French and Russian repertoire along with a celebration of the city of Los Angeles. As well as featuring some of the world’s leading soloists, Icelandic composers and performers are also championed.
Tortelier studied with Nadia Boulanger and is widely recognised for his outstanding work promoting French music, so it’s natural than he leads the ISO in plenty of French repertoire this season. Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel provide more familiar fare, but Tortelier also programmes rarer French flavours. Charles Gounod is mostly known now as a composer of choral music and operas (Faust was one of the 19th century’s most popular operas), but he also composed two symphonies which hardly get a look-in these days. Tortelier includes them both this season. Both were composed in 1855 and fizz with wit joie de vivre, a sort of French Mendelssohn. Poulenc’s racy Concerto for Two Pianos is even more high-spirited, although the central Larghetto has a Mozartean simplicity and innocence. This work has been a favourite of the Labèque sisters over the years. In Reykjavik, another pair of siblings – young Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen – take on the work. Like Poulenc, Jacques Ibert doesn’t always show his serious side. His Flute Concerto was composed in 1934 for Marcel Moyse, one of the great flautists of the 20th century, and the finale positively bursts with fun. Icelandic flautist Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson, formerly with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and now principal of the Chicago Symphony, returns to Reykjavik as soloist.
Another Icelandic soloist this season is pianist Víkingur Ólafsson who has shot to international fame recently due to his playing of Philip Glass. Bachtrack has reviewed this young pianist four times in recent months, praising the way Ólafsson “kept Glass’ multi-layered textures crystal clear and immediate, with a bright, brilliant tone.” His Bach in Istanbul contained “intricate and tasteful ornaments and millisecond perfect trills”. With the ISO next season, Ólafsson plays Mozart (the C minor concerto K491) and Haukur Tómasson's Second Piano Concerto, first performed earlier this year at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and described as “glittering” by the LA Times shortly afterwards.
Other Icelandic composers represented in the season include Páll Ragnar Pálsson, whose new Cello Concerto (also premiered in Hamburg earlier this year) is performed by Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir. The Airwaves concert features works by four Icelandic composers, which have attracted recognition in recent years, further demonstrating the ISO’s commitment to new music.
Jón Leifs can be considered the grandfather of Icelandic classical composition. Born in 1899 under the name Jón Þorleifsson, Leifs studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and conducted a number of orchestras in Germany before turning to composition. His music has a rugged, epic quality, such as Hekla, which depicts a volcanic eruption, or other works drawing on Icelandic sagas. Leifs wrote three oratorios based on episodes from the Icelandic Edda, a medieval manuscript which chronicles old Norse mythology. They were originally designed to be played on three successive evenings, an Icelandic counterpart to Wagner’s Ring – indeed, the final part is titled Ragnarok (The Twilight of the Gods)! Next season, the ISO plays the second part, subtitled “The Lives of the Gods” which should resound impressively in the famed acoustic of Harpa Concert Hall.