Finding the space to breathe: Hildur Guðnadóttir at the Concertgebouw

Icelandic cellist and film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir swept into Amsterdam on Sunday for the 79^th edition of Holland Festival. Looking every bit the Hollywood favourite, her approachable, even humble demeanour belies the huge critical success of her Oscar and Grammy award-winning scores for the must-see HBO series Chernobyl (2019), Tár (2022) starring Cate Blanchett as the controlling maestro, and Joker (2019) the psychological thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix which catapulted her to heights other female film composers have yet to equal.

In her role as associate artist, Monday’s programme at the Concertgebouw with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under fellow compatriot and friend Daniel Bjarnason was twofold. It indirectly celebrated both the 20^th anniversary of her 2006 LP Mount A, but also created a live performance of music close to her heart alongside specially created arrangements from various film scores and two new joint commissions featuring Hildur on the cello. Would her intensely personal compositional and recording style, full of deep, resonant cello lines and electronic vibrations requiring space to breathe, find life in an orchestral setting, even one as resonant as the Concertgebouw? And furthermore, would the audience accept her challenge to curtail their coughing, put away their phones, and really listen?

The programme

In conversation with Hildur Guðnadóttir

Articulated beautifully in conversation the previous day with Aafke Romeijn at the Felix Meritis culture house, Hildur shared her desire to elevate storytelling by looking between the lines to find inner meaning in the things we see. She also confessed to becoming a kind of manipulator of sound by creating music which almost tells us how to feel.

As we listened to Fólk faer andlit – written in response to the 2015 Syrian crisis and a wish for those in peril to be treated with humanity – deep, bass frequencies so reminiscent of impending doom pulsated through our bodies. Her working methods were now vividly clear.

‘What is it that we cannot see with our eyes,’ she asks. ‘And what do we just need to feel?’

She talked of a teenage realisation that ‘sound is just moving air’ and about allowing time in-between notes for air to vibrate, take hold and find its own resonance. All illustrated effectively in the evening’s first new commission Blind Sarabande. As music slipped and slided in a darkened Concertgebouw full of changing lights, her cello and orchestral accompaniment drew the listener close.

In concert

However, as the evening progressed, there was a feeling perhaps of what might have been. Whilst Overcast’s uncertain undulations depicted a more earthy and metallic world, and unpredictable, delicious harmonic turns interspersed with flashing moments of consonance pervaded The Song That Never Was, those pulsating vibrations that had rocked my body the previous day were few and far between. Only in Kaija Saariaho’s Feroce, with its initial descent into a world of harsh white noise, tone clusters and thudding steps, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s depiction of Leonardo DiCaprio trudging endlessly over an Arctic wasteland before finding shelter inside the carcass of a bear in The Revenant, did glimmers of a truly sonic world convince. Could the ISO have worked a little harder to recreate Hildur’s electronic world, especially in numbers lasting just three or four minutes? It all felt just a little fragmented.

Surprisingly, the most successful offering was Alivin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for solo triangle. An instrument which Lucier says holds all the sounds of the world. His ‘score’ I learnt later, is a single page of instructions – just words and no musical notes. Performed spectacularly by Sam Slater, repeated quavers took life as he worked his way around the lonesome triangle, variously dampening and shaping the sound. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, louder or even disintegrating to a deathly hush. Vibrations full of constantly changing overtones filled the auditorium. This was a performance I would pay money to see again. And one where the audience for the most part, obeyed Hildur’s instruction, and really listened.