That soothing neoclassical trend, it's never going to work, is it? Or is it? This serene CD (Volkskrant, three stars) with mainly choral music nicely shows how much the neoclassical style has stuck in Iceland. Soothing slow sounds in many shades of gray, as if in their youth these composers never heard anything else but the soundtracks of Scandinavian crime films. But in Iceland, this typical sound
… world was apparently always there. Like in 1961, when Jón Leifs composed his Elegy (Hinsta kveðja op.53) in memory of his mother. Because of the pandemic, the musicians of the Dmitri Ensemble were forced to keep their distance during the recording of this piece. It contributed to the fragile nature of these intensely sad string sounds. Conductor Graham Ross naturally references the mythical past and the timeless Icelandic landscape as inspiration for all those slow, sonorous textures. Ross became familiar with this world after befriending Icelandic composer Sigurdur Saevarsson. From him we hear a Requiem composed in 2016, which is also already contemporary and timeless at the same time. (HJ)more
