AIŌN (2018)
(AIŌN Symphony)

The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has long been associated with evocations of the earth and tectonic forces. Here, especially in the symphony-length AION her preoccupation is still ecological, but in an abstract, grander sense that surveys immense textures and forms from ever-shifting scales of time and space. Feel small yet?

Thorvaldsdottir’s music partakes of deep, primordial textures and a mysterious sense of structure and flow. ...Each work is rigorously planned, yet the structures remain elusive so that when major events unfold — such as the surprisingly radiant ending of AIŌN — the effect is almost overwhelming.

AIŌN (2018) appears to pre-echo [Thorvaldsdottir's ARCHORA] in longer and more overtly symphonic guise through three movements: ‘Morphosis’, ‘Transcension’ and ‘Entropia’. Here, as might be implied, the impetus is time, which Thorvaldsdottir explores in roiling, sometimes ritualistic textures underpinned by pounding bass drums (three in each piece), ‘as a space that you inhabit rather than … a one-directional journey through a single dimension.’

Among the many wonders of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music — exquisitely honed timbres, an intricate play of shadow and light — perhaps the most mysterious is the way it can sound so static yet be in a state of constant (if sometimes glacial) change … This craftsmanship — a meticulous fusion of pacing, structure and coloring — is also at work in the three-movement “AION” … Thorvaldsdottir is incapable of writing music that doesn’t immediately transfix an open-eared listener.

On Friday night, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hannu Lintu, ... gave the UK premiere of Thorvaldsdóttir’s majestic AIŌN. Taking inspiration from the Hellenistic deity of cyclical time, this sonic adventure cartwheeled back and forth in its own temporal sphere, thunderous and mysterious. Drum rolls shattered our aural universe, instrumental textures glistening in contrast.

AIŌN is a big work, an excavation of space, through which we are buffeted from one kaleidoscopic textural prism to another ... Its close overwhelms the senses, any structure we had hitherto pieced together, splintered in its mass. A sonic tsunami from centre stage enveloped, subsuming the audience in Snape Maltings in both volume and its final flourish. The work retreated, leaving an expanse of silence trembling in its wake. 

an extraordinary three-movement work ... a soundworld that could be massively placid, deafeningly chaotic, weirdly unearthly, or awesome with oceanic majesty.

[AION] took the audience on a moving sound journey ... bathed in a slow-moving sonorous sequence of chord clusters. Whether one describes the sound as primordial, chromatic or stereophonic, the sound envelops you. There is constant movement, rhythms that propel one forward... one’s attention never wanes.

[AION] has the same archaic brutality as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.