You might recognise the name Anna Thorvaldsdottir, the Icelandic cellist and composer, from her beautiful albums cropping up on your radio playlist – not only here on WMHT but worldwide. And she’s not just a name to credit for the music listing. She’s a major figure in Iceland, winner of the 2012 Nordic Council Music Prize, and is beginning to be programmed on stages that range from the Lincoln Center to the BBC Proms and Berlin Phil. I love the otherworldly quality to her music as with this, Archora which the Iceland Symphony has just been touring around Europe. If you've ever had the opportunity to visit Iceland, you can almost "feel" the influence of that landscape on her music – hard, cold, and breathtakingly beautiful.
Born in 1977, in a small peninsular town on Iceland’s west coast, she was drawn to the cello when still tiny and intended to become a professional, playing a lot of Bach and the classical repertoire. But her teacher also introduced her to Penderecki and contemporary music. And that opened her ears to the sense of what might be possible, permission to think differently in music, and so very organically she says, composing gradually took over. She began to find her voice at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, and then it was in America at the University of California San Diego that her career began to take off – collaborating with groups like The Crossing, and New York Phil. The Nordic Council prize came for her very first piece for orchestra and commissions and residencies have poured in from all over the world ever since.
She speaks of her experience growing up that most of the composers you heard of were already deceased men – so it’s easy to think, This is not for me. Also, that sometimes it can be easy for men to see a petite female (as she is) not as their equal, and she has certainly had problems to confront along the way. “But you brush away these things”, she says. “My music is always going to be my music.”
Anna Thorvaldsdottir (1977 –)
MUSIC: Archora
Anna Thorvaldsdottir, cello
Iceland Sym Orch / Eva Ollikainen
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
