01/05/2010 11:57:31
Gramophone Names Icelandic Album One Of Year's Best
The Carmina Chamber Choir's album Melodia has been named one of the best classical albums of the year 2009 by Gramophone, Reykjavik's Grapevine newspaper have reported.
Melodia, released on long-established Icelandic label Smekkleysa, won the Editor's Choice award for November 2009, and is now in 23rd place as one of the year's best.
Melodia, composed in 1660, is one of Iceland’s most remarkable music manuscripts, containing over 200 chants, hymns and folk-songs. The CD contains a fascinating selection of music from this long-neglected document of Iceland’s musical heritage, performed by Icelandic singers on period instruments. A review of the album says in part, "This anthology of music . . . is almost entirely the work of Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, who founded the excellent Carmina Chamber Choir (among whose soloists I could particularly commend the marvellously clean voices of Kristín Erna Blöndal and Marta Guðrún Halldórsdóttir) ...the entire collection is a triumph."
