Performers & composers

Haukur Tómasson

Haukur Tómasson was awarded the 2004 Nordic Council Music Prize, the greatest honor awarded to a Nordic composer. This award, which Tómasson received for his chamber opera Guðrún´s 4th Song, firmly established his stature as one of Scandinavia´s most outstanding composers.

The music of Haukur Tómasson is vibrant and scintillating, characterized by intense rhythmic activity, bright, colorful timbres, and a keen ear for novel and effective instrumental combinations. Tómasson´s music bustles with energy and is often quite complex, although the rapidly moving surface rhythm occasionally comes to a halt, giving way to slowly moving sonorities of imposing power and austere beauty.

Tómasson´s earliest compositions use the numbers of the Fibonacci series to organize durations, intervals and formal proportions (Octette , Eco del passato). His later works (Spiral , Strati , Offspring) are examples of the composer's ‘spiral technique', the chaconne-like development of an underlying chord progression. In the late 1990s Tómasson also began using Icelandic folk material as a basis for his compositions ( Rhyme , Long Shadow ). Tómasson´s interest in form and structure is evident in all his works, lending them a clear underlying sense of unity and logic.
(Árni Heimir Ingólfsson)

Tómassons music is recorded on the BIS-label as well as the label of the Iceland Music Information Center.