All Icelandic music is new music. Composer and pianist Arni Bjornsson, who died in 1995, learned his trade at a time, early this century, when little formal training was on offer and there were virtually no possibilities in his country for music to be published or performed. He earned his living playing in a Reykjavik dance band, conducted choirs, was a founder member of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and, with Jon Leifs, Pall Isolfsson and other pioneers, set up the Society of Icelandic composers. A tragic accident in 1952 severely limited his output just as he was making his mark as a composer: his best music is to be found in his songs and his chamber music which James Lisney has discovered and champions in this beguiling recital.
The Romanzas for violin and piano, character pieces a la Wieniawski, at once reveal that fusion of Icelandic sources and eagerly absorbed European influences so characteristic of his contemporaries. Within the disarming salonesque intimacy hovers the bite of modality and those tell-tale bare fifths from the Icelandic tvisongur. The Piano Sonata is the work of a young man excited by his discovery of romantic piano music: Lisney recreates with great understanding the slow movement’s wandering, with its harmonic waywardness.
The songs, with their light, unobtrusive accompaniments, have a touching simplicity in their direct settings of Icelandic poets such as Jonas Hallgrimsson (1807-45) whose writing led to a literary revival vital to the independence movement. The syllabic, hymn-like La Belle finds sympathetic voice in Gunnar Gudbjornsson’s ardent, supple tenor, while Spring Song, its lines as short and sudden as the season in Iceland, becomes a gambolling dance, matched only by the antics of One-legged Erik.'