A number of projects have slowly been taking form and this year will be a very busy one.
Njáls Saga got implemented and restaged in February, with the joint direction of Svante Aulis Löwenborg and myself. The crew was the same. There were two shows in Oslo and four back in Gothenburg, at the good old Cinnober venue, where it sold out a couple of evenings.
Object of Terror had two prestigious performances, one at the Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg, with the NDR Kammerorchester, on February 10, and at the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles on April 12, with members of the LA Phil. Conductors were, respectively, Jonathan Stockhammer and Daníel Bjarnason.
The recording of Orgoras Speaks, made at the WDR in Cologne in 2009, was made public on Youtube, with a video featuring images by artist Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir (Orgoras video). This piece will furthermore shortly be released on a CD with a couple of other recordings the Zelinsky/Smeyers duo has done as soloists. The CD will be edited and distributed by the German Neos label, which has been building up an impressive catalogue.
My big choir piece, Elsku Borga mín, is being recorded in May and is to be issued as a small book containing the CD, a USB key with the 5.1 version (very appropriate for this piece) and the video by Jeannette Castioni, together with some articles about the piece and its background. Hopefully all this will be ready in October 2017. The project has received some funding, among others from the Iceland Academy of the Arts.
Since a while back I have been planning to stage my children’s music theatre piece, Play Alter Native, on a text by Finn Iunker, in Icelandic. We are getting closer to this goal, and this should happen in some form in the town of Hafnarfjörður in October this year. There will be more news of that in due time.
It seems the news section is missing a report from 2016. I don’t know if this has to do with my being appointed professor at the Iceland Academy of the Arts from August 2016. I have been dedicating quite some time to writing articles, and my musical output has temporarily diminished. However, my post is not full time and a number of revised and new orchestral works should be slowly but surely pouring out in the following months.