Artists’ workspaces are often revealing. Think of maverick painter Maggi Hambling’s studio, which she once described as “the largest ash-tray in Suffolk”. Or the dark, solid Brontë parsonage on the edge of the windswept Pennines. Or Gustav Mahler’s composing huts where he retreated from urban life – and his punishing conducting schedule – to concentrate on producing symphonies.
The thought of Mahler constructing those vast musical architectures in such tiny spaces can be mind-boggling, but it’s nothing in comparison to the cognitive dissonance of visiting Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir at home in rural Surrey.
Over the past 15 years, Anna Thorvaldsdottir has established herself as a leading voice in contemporary music. Although her back catalogue is large and varied, it’s her orchestral works that have generated the most excitement and that form the core of her output. The list of orchestras that have commissioned her – among them the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – reads like a Who’s Who of classical music today.
In a world where orchestral music on the largest scale is still an overwhelmingly male-authored affair, the 45-year-old’s commitment to vast symphonic forces is all the more striking. Her compositions attract a particular kind of awed rhetoric: “glacial movement”, “slowly shifting masses of sound”, “humbling vastness”. Listening to the mysterious tappings, rustlings and barely-there sonorities that open Dreaming (2010), the dizzying slithers and monolithic bass intrusions that punctuate Metacosmos (2017), or the viscera-quaking climaxes of Catamorphosis (2021), it’s hard to resist the idea that Iceland’s stark, volcanic landscape has not only shaped these scores but also still lurks within them. Thorvaldsdottir herself has described Iceland’s mountains and oceans as the “soundtrack to [my] life”.
Even in rural Surrey? “My roots always resonate strongly, no matter where I’m located,” she insists, pouring me a cup of tea from a large, cosy-clad pot. It’s a sunny spring day and the lush and rolling surrounding countryside couldn’t look more English. Thorvaldsdottir and her philosopher husband have been based here since 2017.
Her composing room is a light-filled studio installed in the neatly kept garden. She slides the door shut behind us “in case somebody gets the idea to mow their lawn”, as I marvel at the ultra-stylish emptiness. Only a closed pad of large-format manuscript paper on the desk betrays the fact that the room is used. “I need a lot of sensory stillness when I’m working,” Thorvaldsdottir explains. “And I like to have space. For me, space means not too much clutter – as few things as possible.”
The studio has the feeling of a sanctuary: as distant from the buzz of a concert hall as it is from Iceland. And it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which Thorvaldsdottir is in demand. In the UK alone, she picked up an Ivors Composer Award for Catamorphosis in December 2021, has had a portrait concert at the Wigmore Hall and a major world premiere at the BBC Proms. She has recently finished a UK tour with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with whom she has been composer in residence since 2018. Meanwhile, two of her orchestral scores are being used by choreographer Wayne McGregor in a new work for the Royal Ballet, and she’s one of the featured composers at this month’s Aldeburgh festival, where five of her works will be performed, including three UK premieres.
Billed as “an electrifying exploration of time”, the largest-scale of these premieres is AIŌN, a three-movement work that will be performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Eva Ollikainen. Thorvaldsdottir’s written notes on her works are often knottily philosophical, sometimes actively gnomic. Thus AIŌN (a Greek term that means both “an age” and “the world”) was “inspired by the abstract metaphor of being able to move freely in time, of being able to explore time as a space that you inhabit rather than experiencing it as a one-directional journey through a single dimension.” In person, she is more direct: “It’s a long piece. It’s a big piece.”
At almost 40 minutes and scored for a hefty modern orchestra, AIŌN is certainly both. Having binged on Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s new recording of the work, I find myself gushing about a thrilling moment in the first movement when it sounds as though Thorvaldsdottir is playing the orchestra as a single composite instrument, turning a knob to adjust not only volume but also pitch and intensity of timbre. She smiles at my enthusiasm. “I absolutely think of all these performers, all these instruments, like one organism,” she nods. “You move things and structures in and out of focus through orchestration.”
Metacosmos – programmed at Aldeburgh by the BBC Philharmonic under Rumon Gamba – is shorter but just as ambitious, emerging from the bottom of the orchestra in a mysterious, glowering drone before melodic lines start to multiply and splinter. Like much of Thorvaldsdottir’s music, swathes of the score are finely graded degrees of quiet – what she refers to at one point as “nuances of silence”. “I tend to write in lower dynamics, which for myself more indicates the atmosphere,” she explains.
These are also pieces that unfold on a seemingly geological timescale. Movement is constant but, as a rule, slow. It’s that Icelandic soundscape again. Is she ever drawn to writing faster music? She seems slightly taken aback. “I don’t know … I feel like I have in some places moved quickly. But I think also my references may be a bit different to some other people’s,” she giggles.
Working as standard on such “glacial movement” does have practical implications, of course. Thorvaldsdottir enthuses about “merging the arts”: her works include a chamber opera, UR_, although she doesn’t currently have another opera on the go (“But never say never!”) and is interested in the possibilities of digital multimedia. She is often asked whether she has written music for video games (she hasn’t), and has been approached about film scores. But the problem is that “it’s such a different timescale. My schedule is packed. And movie projects work really quickly.”
The basic abstraction of orchestral concert music certainly seems a good match for someone who describes composing as “like energy, like tapping into some force within yourself and in your environment”, and who insists that “through my music, I’m not describing anything – except the music I’m writing”. I ask whether she ever wishes she could write for even larger forces. “If you want your visions to materialise, then there are maybe some limits,” she grins. “But, you know, if you have a full orchestra, you can pretty much do whatever you like.”
As long as you have full orchestras to work with, that is. The two BBC orchestras about to perform Thorvaldsdottir’s works at Aldeburgh are precisely those ensembles whose size and funding were recently thrown into question. The composer groans as I bring this up. “I wish we wouldn’t have to have this conversation. In the UK, there has been such a magnificent presence of different orchestras. It would be devastating for our musical life if this was jeopardised.”
In this context, Thorvaldsdottir’s explanation of her creative process – “it’s about allowing, you know, trying not to force but allow” – feels like a mantra worth circulating to all funding bodies. But perhaps a government convinced that opera would be better off in car parks might be more inspired by Thorvaldsdottir’s current large-scale project, which challenges some of the most basic conventions of orchestral performance and which will be premiered next year at Harpa, Reykjavik’s state-of-the-art glass music venue. “I am doing an orchestra installation piece not for the concert hall but for the foyer – in an open space, for a deconstructed orchestra.” She sounds delighted, even conspiratorial. Just don’t expect background music.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is at the Aldeburgh festival on 12, 16, 20 and 24 June.
