Goldberg Variations, Ólafsson, Wigmore Hall review - Bach in the shadow of Beethoven

Late changes, and new dramas, from the Icelandic superstar

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.

Reykjavik, Hampstead Theatre review - drama frozen by waves of detail

★★★ REYKJAVIK, HAMPSTEAD THEATRE Drama frozen by waves of detail

Richard Bean’s new play revisits the Hull fishing industry of the 1970s

“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.

Album: John Grant - The Art of the Lie

The forthright US singer-songwriter sets the personal in a wider context

“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.

Driving Mum review - a dark comedy that has you laughing out loud

A son fulfils his mother’s wishes and stifles his own

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.

It's Headed Straight Towards Us, Park Theatre review - indigestible mix of fact and fiction

Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer have muddled aims for a tale of warring actors

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...

Album: Sigur Rós - ÁTTA

★★★★★ SIGUR ROS - ATTA Icelanders distil their already intense sound into yet purer variants

The Icelanders distil their already intense sound into yet purer variants

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.

Prom 34, Soltani, BBC Philharmonic, Ollikainen review - journeys into inner worlds

Nordic and English colours blend in musical landscapes of the heart

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.