Bára Gísladóttir (b. 1989) considers sounds, instruments and ensembles as living organisms. In VAPE, Hringla and COR, the Icelandic composer and double bassist engages with the largest musical organism of all: the symphony orchestra. Inspired by death metal or techno as much as by Scelsi or Penderecki, the foreboding atmosphere of her music is cut through with irony, puns and black humour. After all, organisms themselves – especially human bodies – contain the potential for both comic excess and self-annihilation. In these three works we follow Gísladóttir’s fascination with language and coincidence; we hear an uncompromising interrogation of the body’s excesses and ailments; and, most of all, we see life, vaporous and between states, neither dark nor light.

Deutsche Grammophon is proud to release the world premiere recording of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s A Prayer to the Dynamo. This major orchestral work was inspired in general by the composer’s fascination with technology, and in particular by field recordings he made at Iceland’s Elliðaár power plant and the writings of Henry Adams.

After winning the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand in 1839 and spending two years in Rome, Gounod should have gone on to study in Germany, but he managed in 1842 to persuade the authorities that he should remain in Rome to work on a symphony. In 1843 he visited Mendelssohn who (while trying to dissuade him from wasting his time on Goethes Faust!) urged him to write another symphony. We do not know how much of the First Symphony Gounod had completed by then, but it is not surprising that Mendelssohn figures as one of the key influences on both symphonies. After performances of individual movements in 1855, premieres were given of the First Symphony on 4 March that year and of the Second Symphony on 13 February 1856. Yan Pascal Tortelier and his Iceland Symphony Orchestra demonstrate outstanding precision and musicality in these unjustly neglected works.

The core inspiration behind ARCHORA centres around the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm – a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow – and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.

At the risk of getting doxxed by my musician colleagues, I'm going to divulge a dark truth about classical music: it's never as captivating or molecule-altering for anyone as it is for us on stage. Which is why I often find classical records, especially those of the orchestral persuasion, so underwhelming.

Páll Ísólfsson was the first director of the Reykjavík Music School, which opened in 1930. Like other musicians, he was forced by the lack of opportunity in Iceland to study abroad but, unlike others, he was able to return and work as the Organist at Reykjavík Cathedral to support his activities as a composer. His music for the early Ibsen play The Feast at Solhaug, performed in 1943 in Norwegian on Norway’s National day, was his theatrical début. This was followed in 1945 by the more ambitious score for Úr Myndabók Jónasar Hallgrímssonar.

D’Indy was a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, and a pupil of César Franck. Fauré described him as ‘The Samson of Music’ for his multifarious and generous-minded work as a composer, conductor, educator, and propagandist who greatly strengthened French musical culture. With a style essentially eclectic and strongly influenced above all by Beethoven and Wagner, d’Indy particularly excelled in orchestral composition. He drew particular inspiration from his native region in southern France, and formed a body of post-romantic works richly orchestrated, often inflected with folk-like melodies, and employing Franck’s well-known ‘cyclic method’.