Hildur Guðnadóttir presents Where to From
A special evening of music commissioned by the Barbican, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin and a consortium of partner venues and festivals, featuring Hildur Guðnadóttir on vocals and Cello, presenting her new album Where to From, with Constance Ricard (cello), Liam Byrne (viola da gamba), Peyee Chen (soprano), Nina Guo (soprano), Sarah Saviet (viola), Francesco Donadello (sound engineer) and Theresa Baumgarner (lighting design).
“As is common with musicians, I have a fairly constant stream of music playing in my head. Sometimes I record this stream on my phone, for no other purpose than taking a snapshot of my feeling tone at that moment. You can capture a sense of timing with audio which you can not with a pen. So these recordings became a sort of diary of tonality and timings. Friendship has always been one of the most important elements of how I make and play music. The person and our friendship comes first and their instrument comes second. So my orchestrations are often based around who is playing. When I learned that my friends Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney were going to be in Europe in the summer of 2024, I really wanted to grab the chance to play with them. Strings and voices being our shared instruments, we have always had a strong resonance when we play together. In addition, I called some of my favourite people and musicians and asked them to join – Else Torp, Liam Byrne and Clare O´Connell. Wanting to continue to explore the contemplative tonality from my previous solo records, I orchestrated a handful of my diary entries for them to play. Having largely retreated from touring and playing concerts in the last years, apart from the odd venture, I am very excited to be joined by an ensemble of friends and come out of my concert playing hiatus to play the music of Where to From, along with older pieces from my previous records that I was unable to perform as a one woman band in my touring days. As the 20th anniversary of the release of my first solo record mount A is on the horizon – the concert will span compositions from 2 decades of exploring the relationship between strings and voices, and the space that music both creates and captures.” – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Academy Award winning Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic composer, cellist, and singer who has been manifesting herself at the forefront of experimental pop and contemporary music. In her solo works she draws out a broad spectrum of sounds from her instrument, ranging from intimate simplicity to huge soundscapes. Her work for Film and Television includes Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Mary Magdalene, Tom of Finland, Journey’s End and 20 episodes of the Icelandic TV series Trapped. In addition, her body of work includes scores for films such as Joker, for which she won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe award for Best Original Score. As well as the critically acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl, for which she received a Primetime EMMY award and a GRAMMY Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
Gudnadóttir began playing cello as a child, entered the Reykjavík Music Academy and then moved on to musical studies/composition and new media at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and Universität der Künste Berlin. Hildur has released four critically acclaimed solo albums: Mount A (2006), Without Sinking (2009), Leyfðu Ljósinu (2012) and Saman (2014).
She has composed music for theatre, dance performances and films. The Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, Icelandic National Theatre, Tate Modern, The British Film Institute, The Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm and Gothenburg National Theatre are amongst the institutions that have commissioned new works by Hildur. She was nominated for the Nordic Music Council Prize as composer of the year 2014.
Among others Hildur has performed live and recorded music with Skúli Sverrisson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, múm, Sunn O))), Pan Sonic, Hauschka, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, The Knife, Fever Ray and Throbbing Gristle.
