Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960) tends to be thought of as a ‘one-work wonder’, known only for his Swedish Rhapsody No.1, ‘Midsummer Vigil’. This disc, the fourth in Naxos’s series of Alfvén recordings, ought to change that. The Festival Overture is an exuberant curtain-raiser but the Fourth Symphony, composed in 1919, is a truly wonderful work. Its programme, hinted at in the subtitle ‘From the Outermost Skerries’, was described by the composer as ‘the tale of two young souls. The action takes place in the skerries, where sea rages among the rocks on gloomy, stormy nights, by moonlight and sunshine…the moods of nature are no less symbols for the human heart.’

Deutsche Grammophon is proud to release the world premiere recording of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s A Prayer to the Dynamo. This major orchestral work was inspired in general by the composer’s fascination with technology, and in particular by field recordings he made at Iceland’s Elliðaár power plant and the writings of Henry Adams.

The core inspiration behind ARCHORA centres around the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm – a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow – and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.

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.

Páll Ísólfsson was the first director of the Reykjavík Music School, which opened in 1930. Like other musicians, he was forced by the lack of opportunity in Iceland to study abroad but, unlike others, he was able to return and work as the Organist at Reykjavík Cathedral to support his activities as a composer. His music for the early Ibsen play The Feast at Solhaug, performed in 1943 in Norwegian on Norway’s National day, was his theatrical début. This was followed in 1945 by the more ambitious score for Úr Myndabók Jónasar Hallgrímssonar.

Take these Icelandic works as representational, as suggested by the titles Oceans and Quake, and perhaps Metacosmos. Or take them as abstract, along the lines of the title Concurrence (and that of the successful predecessor to this album, Recurrence). It doesn't really matter: the perspectives converge in the music, which is virtuosic and dense, yet elemental and viscerally affecting. The four works might be grouped in several ways. Haukur Tómasson's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Páll Ragnar Pálsson's Quake each make use of a solo instrument (in Pálsson's case a cello), and listeners could easily become engrossed in the treatment of the soloist in these two works alone.

Jan Sandström (b. 1954) is among the most frequently performed Swedish composers on the international scene today. His ‘Motorbike Concerto’ for trombone and orchestra is for instance one of the most played Swedish orchestral works of all times, with more than 600 performances since its première in 1989. The Motorbike Concerto was the first major result of the collaboration between Sandström and the trombone virtuoso Christian Lindberg – a collaboration which has evolved over the years, to the point that Lindberg here conducts the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in four works reflecting Sandström’s trajectory as composer for orchestra, from Éra (1979–80) to Ocean Child in its revised 2004 version.