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Björk Orkestral with the Hamrahlíð Choir, the extraordinary concert experience recorded at Reykjavík’s Harpa Concert Hall on October 24, 2021, will receive its world-wide physical release on November 27, 2026, available across LP, CD, Blu-ray and DVD.
More than a live recording, Björk Orkestral with the Hamrahlíð Choir captures a meeting between one of Iceland’s most singular musical voices and one of its most important choral institutions. Across an expansive reimagining of Björk’s catalogue, choral arrangements, electronics and her own voice are brought together to reveal familiar songs in unfamiliar forms, sometimes monumental, sometimes fragile, always deeply physical.
Message from Björk –
i am so happy and proud of this concert .. we all put enormous love , energy and time into it . i have learned slowly
through the years , about the juxtaposition of voices and the electronic … for me it is a philosophical matter , how
nature and technology can coexist amicably . i got an opportunity to learn how to get this balance just right ,
through extensive rehearsals in the space we got in covid . it is often easier for me to do this on the recordings ,
but here we did it physically live . and i could tweak older songs that i felt i hadn´t acquired experience yet how to
perform live . i am grateful to bergur þórisson , þorgerður ingólfsdóttir and the hamrahlíð choir for their
generousity and this experience .
thank you
The concert was recorded as part of Björk’s series of Orkestral performances at Harpa in 2021, a project conceived around the idea of returning to her music through orchestration rather than spectacle. Stripped back from the elaborate visual worlds of her larger productions, these performances placed the architecture of the songs themselves centre stage: strings, winds, choir, electronics and voice interacting as one living organism.
At the heart of this particular performance is Hamrahlíðarkórinn, the Hamrahlíð Choir, conducted by its legendary founder Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, whose relationship with Björk has grown into one of the most significant creative collaborations in her recent work. Some of the arrangements were performed by this choir in the recordings, but this live performance also includes other song originally written for other voice-ensembles or instruments from Björk’s catalogue. Their voices bring a different physicality to songs, music that moves between the intimate and the immense.
The repertoire draws primarily from the vocal world of Medúlla (2004) and explores the possibilities of the human voice, nature, technology and new forms of musical collaboration. Heard together in this setting, the songs form a kind of alternate history of Björk’s work: compositions continuously being dismantled, re-orchestrated and rebuilt through new combinations of breath, bodies, electronics and space.
The performance also carries the particular atmosphere of its time. Recorded in Reykjavík in October 2021, as live music and collective gatherings were slowly returning after the profound disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concert brought together musicians and voices at a moment when the simple act of singing together had acquired an extraordinary significance. Across Björk’s four Orkestral concerts at Harpa, more than 100 Icelandic musicians took part, making the series not only a celebration of her catalogue but a portrait of the breadth and depth of Iceland’s musical community.
The proceeds from the original concert series supported Kvennaathvarfið, a women’s shelter in Reykjavík.
For Björk, the Hamrahlíð Choir collaboration has become an ongoing musical relationship rather than a one-off encounter. Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir and the choir first joined Björk on Body Memory, from 2017’s Utopia, before becoming an integral part of the Cornucopia live world. The choir appeared at the original Cornucopia performances at The Shed in New York in 2019, followed by the European tour and the filming of Cornucopia in Lisbon.
The collaboration continues to evolve. Most recently, members of the choir contributed to Sorrowful Soil, part of Björk’s immersive installation at the National Gallery of Iceland, demonstrating a creative relationship that continues to move fluidly between recorded music, live performance, visual art and installation.
With Björk Orkestral with the Hamrahlíð Choir, songs that have travelled through decades of Björk’s musical language are heard anew, not as replicas of their recorded originals, but as compositions still capable of changing shape. The result is a document of Icelandic musicianship, a celebration of the voice and a rare glimpse into the emotional architecture of Björk’s music when the spectacle falls away and the music itself takes centre stage.
