One promise away

Now Hear This is a PBS programme that I've been following for a couple of years with mild interest.  It's a sort of musical travelogue in which conductor and violinist Scott Yoo, often accompanied by his wife, flutist Alice Dade, pursues a given musical theme - a composer, a genre, a geographical setting - and engages in less-than-spontaneous interactions with various experts.  It's good fun and reasonably informative.

I'd deferred on the last episode of this season, "The Iceland Sound", because I didn't think it would be to my taste.

Oh gawd.  It was ethereal.  Much of the music reminded me of the majestic, soul-filling composition by Kjartan Sveinsson that closes out the credits of the film Echo (Bermál), the Icelandic film that made such a deep impression on me during the pandemic.

Two highlights of this episode: 1) an "impromptu" (nothing is impromptu in this series) jam on Icelandic dulcimers called langspil. 

The music starts at about the 2:20 mark. 

The female musician in this clip is Jófríður Ákadóttir, who is kind enough to her international fans to record and perform under "JFDR".  Later in the programme, she sings one of her songs, accompanied by high school students in a "clarinet choir", a clip that isn't online, although you can live-stream the series if you contribute money to PBS, something I resumed when the Creature stopped federal funding.

However, the video for the JFDR song is available:

 

Once an orchid sat/ in a silver night and/ solemnly waited/ Slightly breathing/ Touched its glistening/ tear, only one dream away from/ a perfect birth/ One promise away from birth/ One secret away from/ One dream a--/ One kiss away from life/ from a life/ from another life/ from another life, you know

Then when the sun rose/ in a newer lighting/ Lay his wings on her/ warm with his kisses/ and touched her light feather/ just so they could breathe again/ Just so they could feel the pain/ Just to be reborn again/ 

Then when I said/ Sat his wings down/ Yearning for our love/ Yearning for our love/ one dream away

I really loved the version with the clarinet choir. Icelandic students apparently get their musical education one-on-one on their chosen instrument, because music is so highly valued.  I can't help but wonder what life is like for those who lack musical aptitude in Iceland, because I was certainly never that good.  Is it like life for un-athletic kids in North American schools?

And beauty shall reign alone

No doubt the pandemic has robbed me of many experiences, but it has made many experiences possible, simply by the shifting of much of day-to-day life online. 

For example, I'm not a huge fan of queues, and hence, my attendance at festivals is somewhat curtailed.

This past winter, the Victoria International Film Festival, a great progenitor of queues, made itself available online. In the past, I've attended exactly one film at the VIFF. Now, I took in half a dozen films, and that's only because I didn't subscribe earlier and ran out of time. 

The films were available via your computer, laptop, or phone, and could be watched at any time within a two-week period. I could watch half the film, and finish it later. 

I missed being surrounded by a reacting audience, and being able to eat popcorn (the stuff I make at home doesn't quite cut it), but damn, this was convenient. 

 One of the last films I squeezed in was one I wouldn't have ordinarily have chosen (another plus), and it turned out to be my favourite. 

Echo (Bergmál) is a chronological collection of fifty-six vignettes, that take place over the Christmas period in Iceland. 

Some of these scenes reflect Icelandic Christmas and New Year customs: embracing as the bells ring in Christmas Eve, shooting elaborate fireworks for the New Year, visiting family graves at cemeteries lit with electric crosses. 

Other glimpses illustrate the joys and tragedies of contemporary life: the plight of refugees, child custody Christmas arrangements, the loneliness of the elderly. 

The movie opens with what appears to be a very sparse and modern store Christmas tree display. It turns out to be the brushes of an automatic carwash. 

Of the fifty-six mini-dramas that follow, the one that stays with me is that of a young girl, aged about ten or eleven, who arrives at the home of her father and his new girlfriend for a Christmas visit. Waiting for her father to return, she practises a Chopin piano piece that she's prepared as a surprise for him. The girlfriend's daughter, slightly older, greets her cordially; they're clearly meeting for the first time. The older girl asks if she can try the piano piece, and plays it perfectly, as the young girl's face freezes. Her father reappears, and putting an arm around her shoulder and listening with pleasure, tells his daughter that the older girl is one of his most promising students - that's how he met his girlfriend. 

The scene is understated and heartbreaking, as are vignettes showing a calm emergency operator gently talking an unseen eight-year-old through a wait for police, while his parents fight, or a young woman in her twenties encountering her high-school bully at a bus stop, and enduring a painfully awkward apology, before she flees in embarrassment. 

The film ends with a ship's view of a stormy, swelling North Atlantic, while gorgeous choral music plays. Enchanted, I slowed down the credits to find what it was (because I could) - not particularly helpful. I checked IMDb; nothing. 

It took a bit of digging, but I found it: it's the fourth "act" of an opera called Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen, which apparently means something like "The Explosive Sonics of Divinity" (yikes). The composer is Kjartan Sveinsson, who used to be with the Icelandic rock group Sigur Rós. 

The lyrics of this "Teil IV", however, are in German. In English, they mean: "You are the light of the world/ Soon the sun of the day of resurrection will shine on the bright paths where she awaits her poet / And beauty shall reign alone".