AIŌN

An assembly ban has been imposed in Iceland due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, and all concerts by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra are cancelled until April 13. Please note that ticket holders can exchange their tickets for other orchestra concerts later in the season. Should this not be feasible, the tickets can be refunded through the Harpa Ticket Office. See here. 

Iceland Symphony's Composer-in-Residence Anna Thorvaldsdottir is perhaps Iceland's best-known composer at present. Her works have been released by Deutsche Grammophon, among others, and have been performed by some of the world's top orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Erna Ómarsdóttir, artistic director of the Iceland Dance Company, has worked with outstanding stage artists all over the world and received numerous awards for her art. 

This concert is the premiere of a new work created by Anna and Erna in collaboration. AIŌN was commissioned by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. It had its premiere with the Iceland Dance Company in May 2019 and received great reviews and was described as a"force of nature" by Dagens Nyheter and Die Presse in Germany wrote that the work "demonstrated how much music and movement belong together ... music and dancers became a "body of sound"."

Anna says this about the work, whose title is drawn from Greek mythology: “AIŌN is inspired by the abstract metaphor of being able to move freely in time, of being able to explore time as a place/space that you inhabit rather than experiencing it as a one-directional journey through a single dimension. Disorienting at first, you realize that time extends in all directions simultaneously and that whenever you feel like it, you can access any moment, even simultaneously. As you learn to control the journey, you find that the experience becomes different by taking different perspectives - you can see every moment at once, focus on just some of them, or go there to experience them. You are constantly zooming in and out, both in dimension and perspective. Some moments you want to visit more than others, noticing as you revisit the same moment, how your perception of it changes.” 

A must-see event for all who are interested in contemporary Icelandic music and dance. Don't miss it!