Iceland
Nick Hasted
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.Director Hlynur Pálmason showed his talent for snapping unbending male psyches in a country of physical extremes in A White, White Day, a film as visceral as Scorsese in its riven machismo, Malick-like in its vaporous, uncanny landscapes, and wholly Icelandic in its saga-resembling trials and consequences.Simmering masculine conflict sharpens the brew here too, though both films are laced with humour. The Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, Elgar: Introduction and Allegro etc Sinfonia of London/John Wilson (Chandos)John Wilson has done it again! He is, at breakneck speed, building an extraordinary catalogue of recordings with his supergroup, the Sinfonia of London, which is – particularly in the realm of British string orchestra music – setting the pace both in terms of revelatory performances of canonic works and disinterred forgotten gems. Into that latter category must go last year’s wonderful John Ireland survey, and likewise the Berkeley and Bliss from 2021’ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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. Kian Soltani – Austrian-born with Iranian heritage, and something of a cross-cultural voyager himself – was the soloist in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white marvel with only two protagonists. (Cinematographer Jarin Blatschke has worked on all Eggers’s films, including his first, The Witch, as has costume designer Linda Muir).But similarities end there, and if you wince occasionally at the violence in The Lighthouse, which includes being buried alive, attacks by a deranged supernatural seagull and Read more ...
India Lewis
Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s Magma is certainly not an easy read. It describes, in short chapters, the obsessive and ultimately destructive power of an abusive relationship. It is, at times, patchily written (perhaps because we have been programmed to recognise the clichés in doomed love affairs), but is ultimately compelling, at least in part because some of the aspects of her experience will not be unfamiliar to some readers.This is Hjörleifsdóttir’s first novel – previously, she has only published poetry. Her poetic history is clear in Magma, each chapter acting as a vignette, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Odin’s ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) are the great Norse god’s messengers, at the heart of a myth that was borrowed in watered-down form for Game of Thrones. The myth inspired a suite of pieces by Sigur Rós and a star-studded group of Icelandic friends and collaborators. Unreleased for many years, and only performed a few times, this recording from a Paris concert in 2002 will delight the band’s fans, as well as intriguing admirers of "post-rock" or contemporary classical.The band’s moody and cinematic style is very much present: wide swathes of sound, conjuring landscapes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Icelandic film begins in the titular land of steam, as rain and mist envelop an erratic car which soon tumbles to its doom. The wife of rural policeman Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) was driving, and the mystery of her death and open, infinite wound of their love consumes him during the course of this gripping dissection of damaged masculinity and desperate devotion.Ingimundur’s relationship with his 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (the director’s daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, unsentimentally superb, pictured below) just about anchors him in the present. So too does his affectionate Read more ...
India Lewis
The Museum of Whales is an unfolding: a slow process of describing a country, its people, and its past through its esoteric and bizarre museums. The book is structured into galleries and cabinets, like the museums it describes, and the text is accompanied by often mysterious line drawings with their own key at the end. There are just a few museums that are the main focus, beginning with the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which is just as delightfully and childishly funny as it sounds. Greene is very good at gentle humour, with a particularly memorable description of "necropants" (you’ll have Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Rams before it, the ice-glazed hillsides and stark ochre grasslands of northern Iceland are the backdrop for Grímur Hákonarson’s third feature The County, a rural drama that explores the murkier side of local politics.Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) is a middle-aged, tough-as-nails dairy farmer. She’s grieving for her late husband who recently committed suicide, jack-knifing his truck into a ravine. We later discover he ended his life because of punishing debts owed to a corrupt cooperative that dominates the local farming community. This leaves Igna running the farm near Dalsmynni alone Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve had Chess the musical; now, here’s Chess the play. Tom Morton-Smith, who has experience wrestling recent history into dramatic form with the acclaimed Oppenheimer, turns his attention to the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, in which American challenger Bobby Fischer battled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. The event gained outsize importance from the Cold War propaganda battle – the two men pawns in their countries’ games, and the match characterised as the lone hero versus the Soviet machine.The play follows the tournament through, as both Fischer (Robert Emms, pictured Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Grimes, the Canadian art pop performer, made headlines last week when she predicted the end of musical performance as we know it on a podcast interview with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. Live music, she said, would be “obsolete soon”, while she gave a window of a couple of decades in which artificial intelligence would become “so much better at making art” than human creatives.I suspect that Björk, who has been incorporating cutting edge technology into her music since before Grimes was born, would have a few opinions on live music’s purported obsolescence. Her Cornucopia tour, which Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At a point in history where – yet again – a few misplaced words from English politicians could wreak havoc with Irish lives, this is a welcome revival of Ian Rickson’s stunning production which first played here to rapturous reviews last year. Brian Friel’s 1980 play reveals itself once more as a simultaneously raw and poignant tragicomedy, which deftly demonstrates how any abuse of the complex relationship between language and identity can all too easily lead to bloodshed.The audience enters the Olivier to witness a landscape on which the low-lying clouds and reddish sky create a sense that Read more ...