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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, Elgar: Introduction and Allegro etc Sinfonia of London/John Wilson (Chandos)