Cancelled: Sibelius and Beethoven

The concert has been cancelled due to assembly regulations in Iceland. 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.

New and old music is woven together in this programme at the Iceland Symphony, spanning centuries from Beethoven to a brand-new Nordic work. Lapland-born Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen has been highly praised for her music and was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2018. Her most recent work, a co-commission by the Iceland Symphony and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, is inspired by Arctic ice and the slow rhythm of the changing seasons.

Beethoven's wonderfully lyrical Romance for violin is interpreted by Una Sveinbjarnardóttir, the Iceland Symphony's third concertmaster, and a recent tuba concerto by Matthew Hightower is performed by Nimrod Ron, the Iceland Symphony's tubist. George Walker was the first black composer to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Music, and the passionate Lyric for strings is his best-known work. The concert concludes where it began, in the Arctic North, with Sibelius's masterpiece Pohjola's Daughter, inspired by Finnish mythology and folk poetry.