The sound of Iceland

The lur is a horn, modelled in bronze after a number of 3,000-year-old instruments discovered at various archaeological sites across Scandinavia. Its unrefined yet distinctive sound — penetrating, direct and rough-edged — seems to rise up through the body rather than enter through the ears, like the stirring of a long-forgotten memory. The instrument, whose long neck reaches high above the heads of its players, is the first thing one hears in Jon Leifs’s second Edda oratorio. Two of them intone bare, open fifths, resonating against sustained low notes in the woodwind, rising up through the orchestral texture as it fills out. When the choir enters, they too sing in fifths, lurching from one bare harmony to another, incanting the coming of the Aesir, the Norse Gods. The music is rough and jarring. The world whose creation is being narrated really does sound unready, incomplete.

No one has heard this before, a fact which enhances the grandeur of the moment as well as its curiosity value. In Harpa, Reykjavik’s shiny harbour-side concert hall, the main auditorium is packed with an audience of young and old Icelanders eager to hear the sound of where they come from, so to speak. Much of Leifs’s postwar career was dedicated to composing three grand oratorios based on the Edda, the Norse creation legends originally written down in the 13th century by the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson. Leifs’s idea was that the oratorios would together constitute a kind of national monument in sound, articulating the cultural and national bonds which tie this blasted and volatile northern Atlantic rock to the people who walk on it. He knew Wagner’s Ring cycle, of course, but considered it too romanticised. Iceland, according to Leifs, needed its own national creation myth to be set in music that was entirely Iceland’s own.