London orchestras do communicate with each other, sometimes at least, when it comes to programming.
Oh dear. I thought that this was going to be one of those exciting fantasy films that livened up TV on weekend afternoons in my childhood, and that there would be kitschy special effects and ludicrous dialogue. But no, it's not 20,00 Leagues under the Sea, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or even Dr Doolittle.
We’ve been here before. Not to exactly the same territory, but to a neighbouring space in the same time frame. Last year, theartsdesk looked at a reissue of 2007’s Room to Expand, the first widely available album by the minimalist pianist Hauschka. The album’s reappearance was a moment to reflect on Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Christian Wallumrød, some of Hauschka’s fellow travellers in the inelegantly tagged post-classical groundswell, all of whom first attracted widespread attention a decade ago.
Neil Gaiman understood the country where he’d landed as an immigrant in the Nineties by writing American Gods.
Anyone who's followed Yrsa's earlier novels, many of them featuring down-to-earth attorney Thora Gudmundsdóttir as heroine, will value her superb evocation of very distinct and haunting parts of Iceland - the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Heimaey island, the Western Fjords. Sense of place is relatively unimportant in The Legacy, 2014 start to a new series now translated by Victoria Cribb.
Odin the All-Father, “lord of the slain, the gallows god”, has two ravens that “perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears” as he wanders in disguise around the world. They are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory. Over many centuries, the folk-stories of the northlands have lodged in our memory and shaped our thought. “Winter is coming” runs the doomy refrain of Game of Thrones, haunting the imagination of the millennial millions who have never directly heard of Ragnarok, “the end of all things”, and the big chill of the “Fimbulwinter” that will usher in apocalypse.
Another night, another woman battered/strangled/raped/murdered. On Sunday a pregnant woman was brutally slapped about by her husband in Call the Midwife, while Emily Watson’s character in Apple Tree Yard was the victim of a punishment rape. And so it continues in Case, the latest Nordic noir to make its way here, this time from Iceland. It opened with two police officers making their way to the stage of a theatre.
On the final night of Iceland Airwaves 2016, Polly Jean Harvey and her band are ranged in a line just inside the edge of the stage constructed inside Valshöllin, a sports hall south of Reykjavík’s city centre. The festival’s five days have climaxed with a diamond-hard performance drawing heavily on this year’s Hope Six Demolition Project album.
I'll be straight: I wasn't sure what to expect at this show, because I've never been a Björk fanatic as such. I loved – and saw live – The Sugarcubes as a teenager, I've raved to her Nineties Debut and Post era tracks, and I've enjoyed plenty more since, not least the intimacies of Vespertine [2001] and the wild expansiveness of Volta [2007].
Despite culminating with “Orphic Hymn”, a musical setting of Ovid’s text, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Orphée is not a literal interpretation of the Orpheus myth. Instead, the album uses retellings of the story – quoting the press release – to inspire “a meditation on beauty and the process of creation.” The result is a mutable series of 14 instrumental pieces preceding “Orphic Hymn” which describe the entire arc of Jóhannsson’s artistic character.