Chapter 03
Hymns, Choirs, Jón Leifs and the Making of Concert Iceland
5 min
Sacred song lives in calendars and rooms
Lutheran Christianity shaped Icelandic literacy and public singing for centuries. Hallgrímur Pétursson's Passíusálmar, a cycle of fifty Passion Hymns, became one of the country's most enduring devotional texts. The poems have been read, sung and broadcast in different settings, especially around Lent. A printed hymn does not tell us one permanent melody or performance style; its life depends on families, congregations, clergy, broadcasters and musicians.
Church acoustics matter. Long decay can join separate voices into a broad halo, but singers still have to place consonants and agree on pitch. Icelandic choral culture includes parish choirs, school choirs, men's and women's ensembles, chamber groups and major concert choirs. The sound ranges from direct congregational singing to highly trained contemporary work. Calling all of it sacred would erase more than it explains.
Skálholt Summer Concerts offers a particularly useful meeting point. The historic church in South Iceland hosts early music, chamber repertory and new composition. A concert there is shaped by architecture and history, yet the programme is current and made by named artists. Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík provides another strong route, especially for organ, choir and contemporary festivals. Check the calendar rather than arriving with a demand for timeless atmosphere.
Catholic, Ásatrú and migrant communities also make music in Iceland. Their practices cannot be inferred from majority Lutheran history. Modern Ásatrú ceremonies are living religious events, not demonstrations of Viking music. Polish and other migrant congregations may carry languages and repertories that are part of present Icelandic life without becoming evidence for a single national sound.
Jón Leifs wanted an orchestra large enough for an idea
Jón Leifs occupies a difficult and important place. He studied and worked abroad, collected folk material, conducted, organized and tried to create concert music with an emphatically Icelandic historical imagination. Works such as Hekla, Geysir and the enormous Edda project use orchestra and percussion with physical force. Their subjects invite geological and mythic description, but their achievement lies in compositional decisions: density, rhythm, register, mass and duration.
The Edda oratorios make the distinction between old text and modern music especially clear. Leifs drew on Eddic material, but the scores are twentieth-century compositions. Edda II: The Lives of the Gods took fifteen years to complete and did not receive its full world premiere until 2018, more than fifty years after the composer's death. The performance required soloists Hanna Dóra Sturludóttir, Elmar Gilbertsson and Kristinn Sigmundsson, Schola Cantorum, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and conductor Hermann Bäumer. The event belongs to modern performance history, even when the words look far backward.
Leifs should not stand alone as Icelandic concert music. His ambitions make more sense beside the institutions that could eventually perform them and beside composers who chose very different paths. Atli Heimir Sveinsson, Jón Nordal, Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson and Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson expanded orchestral, chamber and sacred repertories across the later twentieth century. Performers and broadcasters turned scores into public experience.
The orchestra is younger than its repertory
The Iceland Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1950. It grew from a small professional environment into a full-time national orchestra, performing at home, touring and recording. Its relationship with RÚV broadcasting was foundational: concerts could reach listeners who never entered a Reykjavík hall. Since moving into Harpa, the orchestra has gained a purpose-built home while retaining its role in education and new-music performance.
The orchestra's international makeup is audible as professional breadth, not as a dilution of nationality. Players bring training and experience from many places. Guest conductors and soloists work alongside Icelandic composers and resident artists. A national institution is therefore a site of encounter rather than a closed ethnic sound.
The album Recurrence provides an excellent single doorway into recent Icelandic orchestral writing. Daníel Bjarnason, Þuríður Jónsdóttir, María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir and Hlynur A. Vilmarsson do not share one texture. Compare their approaches to pulse, instrumental colour, space and formal movement. The reward is difference.
Anna Þorvaldsdóttir often builds large forms from changing timbral masses. Small internal actions accumulate inside broad spans. The music may feel patient, but it is rarely static. Bára Gísladóttir can make bass weight, noise and physical instrumental effort central to form. Hugi Guðmundsson moves through choral, orchestral and electronic resources with another sense of proportion. Daníel Bjarnason frequently places dramatic contrast and brilliant orchestral attack in the foreground. These are individual grammars.
Pianists, singers and ensembles finish the map
Composers do not sound without interpreters. Víkingur Ólafsson has built international recording projects around Bach, Mozart and other repertory, using sequence and touch to make familiar works newly connected. His importance to Icelandic music lies partly in that interpretive authorship. He does not need to perform an Icelandic score in order to belong to Iceland's musical history.
Contemporary singers such as Hanna Dóra Sturludóttir and Álfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir move between opera, orchestral projects and new works. Ensembles including Caput, Nordic Affect, Cauda Collective, Cantoque and Viibra create different relationships among historical instruments, contemporary notation, improvisation and staged performance. Dark Music Days remains the clearest annual place to hear this field collide.
The concert tradition is therefore not a solemn corridor from Jón Leifs to Harpa. It is a network of schools, churches, rehearsal rooms, broadcasts, festivals, ensembles and performers. Listen for the network, and the monuments become human again.
