The programme ends with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Passacaglia. In many ways, this is an unusual end to a concert. It will not leave you with a spring in your step. Instead, it reveals a thread that has run through the programme: the extraordinary power and beauty of sound pared back; music stripped to its essence; the magic of instruments; the echo of a landscape likewise stark, forbidding and breathtaking in equal measure. Jóhann, who died in 2018 (aged only 48), was best known for his film scores: The Theory of Everything (2014), Sicario (2015), and Arrival (2016). Passacaglia is an earlier and more private thing: a string-quartet version of the finale of IBM 1401, A User’s Manual – his fourth full-length studio album, released on 4AD in 2006. Here, Jóhann works in the tradition of the Baroque Passacaglia, a dance form from the 17th century characterised by its slow, solemn atmosphere and repeating bass line. That line begins – in Passacaglia – in high strings that descend, stepwise, until the music folds back in on itself, line accompanying its own echo. The result is a lament, stark and simple. Then, the piece ends in something more violent: urgently repeated figures on tutti strings, alternating with fragments of the earlier, more elegiac material. This contrast – the same music of extremes heard throughout the programme – closing, perhaps, on that echo of the Icelandic landscape: black earth, green moss, and white snow.   

Benjamin Tassie