AERIALITY (2011)

Many orchestras have a calling card – for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra that is Aeriality.


A convincing abstract piece – a striking study in orchestral textures, with slowly shifting masses of sound that are sometimes enriched with quarter tones, pierced by solo woodwind lines or dissolved into Ligeti-like micropolyphony, before eventually fading away in a unison for the whole orchestra.

There’s a primal, brooding quality to the music which almost seems to holds its breath, waiting for an eruption. Cluster harmonies and a host of percussion effects – bowed cymbals, bass drum “massaged” with brushes – gripped the attention in this enthralling performance.

'Aeriality' is a broad tapestry in which each instrument does its own thing on its own terms, contributing to the swirling stasis of the bigger picture … in this piece we also hear Thorvaldsdóttir expanding her language in the direction of quarter-tones and noise music while pushing the idea of a single monolith to breaking point as her characteristic pedal notes creak under the weight of the machinery they support.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s masterpiece Aeriality had the most magnetic and profound effect of all the music played, inducing a rare, extended silence in the cavernous Royal Festival Hall after its final notes had died away.

From the sinister first bar through to the glorious dissipation sound into silence at the end, Aeriality is spellbinding, the vast structure of the piece grasping the ear and demanding attention.

In Aeriality, sounds bend and warp without rest over the 13-minute composition... The piece asks that the orchestra ride through moments of sweetness and austerity in a spectrum of timbres occasionally reminiscent of a whale’s muted croaks and the growling earth.

Thorvaldsdottir uses the orchestra to create a voluminous cloud of sound that grows, swirls and thins out in a haze shimmering with microtonal dissonances. Metallic percussion instruments add sputters and sparks. Toward the end, the music pools into consonance in a way that viscerally evokes a clearing of the air.

...Thorvaldsdóttir’s score evolves slowly, deliberately, in a constant surge of sound.

Aerality leans on sustained notes, yet its sonorities are so alive with ever-changing instrumental filigree that it simultaneously achieves a state of stasis and of transformation.

It’s a striking piece of music, with a distinct and original style...the warm radiance of the strings a delightful textual contrast to earlier chilliness. Thorvaldsdóttir’s deployment of percussion that is often conversational against the low rumble of the strings is deftly done.

This is a big spinning planet of a work that, to echo Whitman, contains multitudes of ideas within itself, pregnant with promise from the opening whipcrack of percussion and major-key chord that keeps reasserting itself as tendrils of other sounds curl off it like smoke.”