The Icelanders are back, this time with Daníel Bjarnason conducting the L.A. Phil New Music Group for a Green Umbrella program of Nordic works, including a Thurídur Jónsdóttir premiere and featuring best-selling Islandic pianist Vikingur Ólafsson.
There may be nothing puzzling about an influx of artists from the Nordic countries to sunny Southern California, but our interest in the chilly north is less expected. Nordic noir is, of course, cool. Do I have to mention Björk? Here’s hoping that evocative Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Gudnadottir, who is on a roll with Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for her soundtrack to “Joker,” becomes the first woman since 1997 to win an Oscar on Sunday for original score.
But butterflies? What’s that got to do with the price of tea in Reykjavik? Not just the “butterfly effect” of some small disturbance far away producing a strong local effect but multicolored wings in full fluttery flight.On Tuesday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the L.A. Phil this time turned over its Green Umbrella concert to Bjarnason and Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson as cocurators of a program of Nordic new music.
Although Sorenson’s “The Weeping White Room” and Bjarnason’s “Five Possibilities” were butterfly-free, all in all, it was a night of effervescent trembling, quivering, flickering pulsations, which a post-concert percussion performance further amplified. This is butterfly as sensibility, as color and fantasy just out of grasp. The piano writing, butterfly glittery and gorgeous, pulls toward sentimentality. Buttery strings, gorgeous but muted, are like a fog that softens but also distorts. Nothing is solid. Nothing, yet again, is real.at Disney last season , Ólafsson made every note he touched glow. Bjarnason is an eloquent conductor with a bent, you might say, for Sorensen’s sensitivity.
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