Iceland rides a classical wave

The island's distinct culture and geography have helped shape a unique orchestral tradition that crosses many genres and the world is starting to pay attention

- Andrew Mellor

On 31 May 1926, a ship carrying the entire Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra docked in Reykjavík. The musicians stayed in Iceland for 17 days, giving 14 concerts of music by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert at venues including a tuberculosis sanatorium. Local critic Árni Thorsteinson described the visit as "the greatest event in the history of the arts in this country." While the rest of Europe was falling for cinema, Icelanders were getting their first taste of a full-size live symphony orchestra.

Organised instrumental music making came late to Iceland, hardly surprising in a country that still has to import most things besides electricity and fish. Iceland's genre-blind musicians channel the challenges of living on a forbidding chunk of volcanic rock into the creation of progressive music that gives the impression of having resounded for ever. Icelanders cleave to homegrown acts, with a quarter of top-10 charting music on Spotify made domestically, but the rest of the world appears to love those acts too. Björk, Sigur Rós and Ólafur Arnalds are some of the best-known names to have found global success with highly distinctive music.

In 1950, Reykjavík got a full-time symphony orchestra of its own. These days it occupies Harpa, a brand-new glass concert hall that dominates the capital from its perch on the harbourside, a triumph of civic aspiration that appears to have been designed for a far bigger town. When the Grammy-nominated Iceland Symphony Orchestra tours the UK this month, it will combine a programme of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven with new Icelandic classical music.