Five songs and a Symphony

An orchestral composition by a woman was a rarity in the 19^th century. In the eyes of men, who controlled musical life in those days, women's compositional efforts were better spent on smaller works that could be performed at home: songs and piano pieces. Fanny Mendelssohn was a highly educated musician who wrote only one orchestral piece, the Overture now heard for the first time in Iceland. This is a welcome opportunity to become better acquainted with a remarkable artist.

For his new song cycle, Hafliði Hallgrímsson selected poems by three of England's leading 18^th- and 19^th-century poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and Christina Rossetti. After hearing the February 2016 premiere by Helena Juntunen and John Storgårds with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the critic from The Telegraph called the work “a thoroughly convincing whole, bound together by Hallgrímsson's abundant aural imagination and remarkable sense of orchestral colour.”