AION
For orchestra
Duration 40 minutes
Instrumentation: 2+afl.0.2+bcl.2+cbn / 4021 / 3perc / str
Listen to AION on Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music
Commisioned by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, co-commissioned by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
AION is a symphony-scale orchestral work in three parts written in 2018. The movements are titled Morphosis, Transcension and Entropia.
The piece was premiered at the Point Music Festival with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. See here for more information about the event.
AION was nominated for the 2021 Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Music Composition Prize
AION is featured on Anna’s new orchestral portrait album, performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Eva Ollikainen - the album was among the year’s top classical albums at the New York Times and at the Boston Globe
Previous performances include:
Orchestras - Iceland Symphony Orchestra (multiple), BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Rusk Festival Orchestra, Arctic Philharmonic
Conductors - Eva Ollikainen, Hannu Lintu, Anna-Maria Helsing (multiple), John Kennedy
Program notes:
AIŌN is a symphony-scale orchestral work in three movements, titled Morphosis, Transcension and Entropia.
AIŌN is inspired by the abstract metaphor of being able to move freely in time, of being able to explore time as a space that you inhabit rather than experiencing it as a one-directional journey through a single dimension. Disorienting at first, you realize that time extends in all directions simultaneously and that whenever you feel like it, you can access any moment, even simultaneously. As you learn to control the journey, you find that the experience becomes different by taking different perspectives - you can see every moment at once, focus on just some of them, or go there to experience them. You are constantly zooming in and out, both in dimension and perspective. Some moments you want to visit more than others, noticing as you revisit the same moment, how your perception of it changes. This metaphor is connected to a number of broader background ideas in relation to the work: How we relate to our lives, to the ecosystem, and to our place in the broader scheme of things, and how at any given moment we are connected both to the past and to the future, not just of our own lives but across - and beyond - generations.
As with my music generally, the inspiration behind AIŌN is not something I am trying to describe through the music or what the music is “about”, as such – it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the piece.
Selected reviews:
“The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has long been associated with evocations of the earth and tectonic forces. Here, especially in the symphony-length “Aion,” her preoccupation is still ecological, but in an abstract, grander sense that surveys immense textures and forms from ever-shifting scales of time and space. Feel small yet?" - Joshua Barone, NY Times, December 2023
“Thorvaldsdottir’s music partakes of deep, primordial textures and a mysterious sense of structure and flow. In these two darkly spacious, beautifully played pieces, she unlocks an entirely new world of undulating sounds, as if tectonic plates of an alien planet were shifting against one another. Each work is rigorously planned, yet the structures remain elusive so that when major events unfold — such as the surprisingly radiant ending of “AIŌN” — the effect is almost overwhelming.” - David Weininger, Boston Globe, December 2023
“Among the many wonders of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music — exquisitely honed timbres, an intricate play of shadow and light — perhaps the most mysterious is the way it can sound so static yet be in a state of constant (if sometimes glacial) change … This craftsmanship — a meticulous fusion of pacing, structure and coloring — is also at work in the three-movement “AION” … Thorvaldsdottir is incapable of writing music that doesn’t immediately transfix an open-eared listener.” - David Weininger, NY Times, June 2023
“On Friday night, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hannu Lintu, … gave the UK premiere of Thorvaldsdóttir’s majestic AIŌN. Taking inspiration from the Hellenistic deity of cyclical time, this sonic adventure cartwheeled back and forth in its own temporal sphere, thunderous and mysterious. Drum rolls shattered our aural universe, instrumental textures glistening in contrast." - Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian, June 2023
“AIŌN is a big work, an excavation of space, through which we are buffeted from one kaleidoscopic textural prism to another ... Its close overwhelms the senses, any structure we had hitherto pieced together, splintered in its mass. A sonic tsunami from centre stage enveloped, subsuming the audience in Snape Maltings in both volume and its final flourish. The work retreated, leaving an expanse of silence trembling in its wake.” - Rose Dodd, Bachtrack, June 2023
“an extraordinary three-movement work ... a soundworld that could be massively placid, deafeningly chaotic, weirdly unearthly, or awesome with oceanic majesty” - Perry Tannenbaum, Classical Voice North America (US)
“[AION] took the audience on a moving sound journey ... bathed in a slow-moving sonorous sequence of chord clusters. Whether one describes the sound as primordial, chromatic or stereophonic, the sound envelops you. There is constant movement, rhythms that propel one forward... one’s attention never wanes.” - Deanna McBroom, The Post and Courier (US)
“It is intense, surprising, and beautiful. AION takes you to another place.” - Anki Gerhardsen, Nordlys (Norway)
“[AION] has the same archaic brutality as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring” - Sofia Nyblom, Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)
“Otherwordly... The chords were dissonant yet full of atmosphere, dark and enticing. They conjured a world of magic and spiritualism... a bacchanalia of natural forces that defies description ... remarkable music” - Jonas Sen, Frettabladid (Iceland)
“electrifying ... there was much to think about here” - David Nice, The Arts Desk (UK)
“like a force of nature” - Johanna Paulsson, Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)
“an abstract work … that managed to move and make everyone think” - Luis Gago, El País (Spain)
