The string quartets, from Yggdrasil (7/95), led us in gently; the Saga Symphony (3/96) pounded the world of Jon Leifs into our consciousness. And now these fine recordings from BIS have been followed by an album from Chandos which close-focuses the preoccupations of this pioneer of Icelandic music who, like the painter Johannes Kjarval and the Nobel prize-winning novelist Halldor Laxness, helped to carve out the country’s cultural identity in the first half of this century.
The Icelandic Overture opens with “Island farsaelda fron”, a melody which rises from the country’s deepest consciousness. With seven other tunes, characteristically coexisting and overlapping without development, it is whirled into a resounding choral climax in the voices of the Langholts Church Choir. Seven patriotic poems are heard in stark choral settings, sung by the Icelandic Opera Chorus, in the Iceland Cantata, written to celebrate the millennium of the Althing, or parliament, in 1930. Words are compacted in chords, punctuated by percussion and brass, and ripple over each other as tales break, wave-like, through one generation after another.
The Iceland Symphony Orchestra, who have just completed their first tour of the States, are fervent accompanists here, and give finely drawn performances of the ten-minute Elegy for strings, written in response to the death of Leifs’s mother, and recalling the Second String Quartet, Vita et Mors in its quiet inhalation and exhalation of open-textured, modal writing. Fine I and II are short, late orchestral pieces written just five years before Leifs’s own death, and vibrant with tone clusters and straining chords inhabiting that totally isolated tone-world which conveyed Leifs’s “greetings to earthly life”.'