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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. So not... immediate. Which is why I am approaching zealot status in my admiration for Sono Luminus and the way in which it submerges listeners within reach of the Atlantis that is the on-stage experience. Which is why, save for live performance, the often inimitable new-music originating in, or in proximity to, Iceland (homeland to an unreasonable percentage of the composers living rent-free in my headphones for more than a decade) has found it's most ardent advocate and most clarion amplifier in Winchester, Virginia. Certainly it's exceptional national orchestra has. Despite a bewildering insistence by journalists to characterize music written by those with Icelandic surnames as a monolith, the entries on this tracklist are as singular as hand blown glass. The inclusion of American sonic clairvoyant Missy Mazzoli is a helpful geographic foil here, but there is one element fusing all of these inventions Your person is about to feel minuscule or massive, by contrast to - or motivated by - these sounds. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music is often intimidatingly cyclopean, and Catamorphosis at times mimics the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft- ian deities, but it simultaneously introduces an iridescent hope I have not encountered before in her music. Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) catapults us from one end of a pulsing solar system to the other while Daníel Bjarnason's From Space I Saw Earth improbably stretches perspective from earth to the moon and back, seeming somehow both terrestrial and paranormal within a single phrase. Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir's Clo
