Ice Land : the eternal music

"Recording of the week: Contemporary Northern European choral music has acquired a reputation for being, in a sense, the Northern Lights set to music - ethereal, shimmering, weightless - but Anna Þorvaldsdóttir's Ad genua is worlds away from such thoughts ... Jón Leifs' haunting Hinsta kveðja, written in memory of his mother, is a magnificent addition to the string orchestra canon, with tonal shifts reminiscent of late Vaughan Williams".

Læs anmeldelse

"Graham Ross isn't the first musician to have got Iceland under his skin ... With his Cambridge choir and his own chamber orchestra, he brings us a programme 'bound together by the common relation its sound world bears to the timelessness of Iceland's topgraphy' ... But even after a rather disjointed listening experience, the residual feeling here is of a warm bath, the smoothed cadences and sugar coatings conceling the true experience of a country that, beyond the Blue Lagoon, is cold, brutal, fortitudinous and uses its timelessness to create distinctive and forward-looking art ... There's just a taste of it here on an album whose music runs the gamut of fine to mediocre - and which, despite its title, has precious little of Iceland's 'eternal music' on it".