Atmospheriques - Iceland Symphony Orchestra (CD+BLURAY AUDIO)

At the risk of being outed by my fellow musicians, I'm going to reveal a dark truth about classical music: it's not as captivating or molecule-changing for anyone as it is for us on stage. That's why I often find classical records, especially the orchestral kind, so unconvincing. So little... immediate. That's why I admire Sono Luminus and the way it immerses listeners in the Atlantis of the stage experience, almost like a zealot. It's also why the often inimitable new music that hails from Iceland or nearby (the home of an inordinate percentage of the composers who have lived rent-free in my headphones for more than a decade) has found its most ardent advocate and clearest amplifier in Winchester, Virginia, bar none live performances. Most certainly its extraordinary national orchestra has. Despite the baffling insistence of journalists to characterize music written by people with Icelandic surnames as a monolith, the entries on this tracklist are as unique as hand-blown glass. The inclusion of American sonic psychic Missy Mazzoli is a helpful geographical foil here, but there's an element that brings all these inventions together: Your person will feel tiny, or massive, in contrast to - or motivated by - these sounds. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music is often intimidatingly cyclopean, and Catamorphosis at times mimics the cosmic indifference of Lovecraftian deities, but at the same time introduces a dazzling hopefulness that I have yet to experience in her music. Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) catapults us from one end of a pulsating solar system to the other, while Daníel Bjarnason's From Space I Saw Earth improbably stretches perspective from the earth to the moon and back, seeming to be both earthly and paranormal in a single phrase. Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir's Clockworking bridges a similar expanse, coexisting in the measurable sphere of timekeeping ... and in the immeasurable sphere of what happens as the seconds tick by. Is Bára Gísladóttir's ÓS gasping for air, or is she exhaling in despair? Whichever way you look at it, and as with every waypoint on this illusory journey, the answer is probably: both. (Doyle Armbrust)