This appointment continues the composer’s relationship with the orchestra which commissioned AERIALITY, a work that has been performed over 20 times since its premiere in 2011. Its recording of Dreaming, released last year, was greeted with excellent reviews.
Arna Kristín Einarsdottir, Managing Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra said:
“It has been a thrill to follow the international attention that Icelandic music and musicians have received in the past few years, Anna Thorvaldsdottir has played a big part in this, and her career is quite extraordinary. Many of the world’s leading orchestras have commissioned and premiered her works; she has received many important honours and awards, and was listed as one of the world’s 35 most important female composers of the 20th and 21st centuries by the Washington Post’s music critic. It is a great honour for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra to welcome Anna as part of our team and we have high expectations for our collaboration. This is a milestone in the orchestra’s history as she is the first woman to be chosen as Composer-in-Residence – it is certainly about time.”Anna Thorvaldsdottir said:
“It will be wonderful to work with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in this way - orchestral music has a very special place with me and I am very much looking forward to working together on the various projects that await us. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra has for a long time been at the forefront of contemporary music programming, and the fact that they are able to have a Composer-in-Residence that works with contemporary music invaluably strengthens that aspect of their work. I am very thankful to be able to collaborate with such a wonderful group of people on continuing to make contemporary music a distinctly visible and diverse part of the orchestra’s efforts.”Read full announcement
Thorvaldsdottir’s latest orchestral work, METACOSMOS, receives its world premiere performances on April 4, 5 and 6. The piece has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic with the support of the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music and will be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Among other highlights in the coming months are performances of the composer’s music by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, as well as at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox series and the twentieth anniversary of Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW series.
