On an evening in early June, inside the cranberry-hued orchestra hall of Iceland’s Harpa, a sold-out crowd of hundreds held their breath for Hildur Guðnadóttir to take the stage. When she does, introducing herself informally as the 2026 Reykjavik Arts Festival’s Artist-in-Residence, the pressure of anticipation bursts, and the hall floods with applause.
Here she is, undisputed inheritor of Iceland’s classical mantle, finally back on an Icelandic stage after over a decade. Though her gait is light, she carries with her the weight of her newfound accomplishments and all the expectations that tend to accompany them.
Guðnadóttir has spent the last decade becoming one of the world’s most renowned scorers of contemporary visual media. A continuing series of scores for critically acclaimed films and shows has thrust her into worldwide recognition as a composer, with the end-of-decade combo of Craig Mazin’s 2019 miniseries, Chernobyl, and Todd Phillips’s Joker sealing her fate. When Guðnadóttir won the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Original Score for the latter, she became the first female composer in 19 years, and the first solo woman composer in history, to receive the award. Her subsequent Academy Award win for Best Original Score made her the first Icelander in history to win an Oscar — not just that Oscar, but any Oscar.
For her appearance as the Artist-in-Residence of the 2026 Reykjavik Arts Festival, Hildur Guðnadóttir prepared three distinct concerts across the festival’s two-week-long programming. For this first concert — titled Nærmynd, translated to Close Up — she comes armed with a selection of arrangements in varying contexts: full-bodied expansions of her original works, like the menacing “Allegro” from Todd Field’s Tár (2022); covers of songs that had profoundly inspired her, from Mica Levi’s piercing Under the Skin (2013) cut “Love” to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ponderous theme for Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015); and two original compositions written in anticipation of the show.
One of them, “Blind Sarabande”, is the very next thing to hit the audience’s ears after the applause ends. Walking to her cello and taking a seat behind it, Guðnadóttir starts to run her bow steadily across its strings. A sextet of accompanying cellists gradually joined her, forming a harmonious cascade of stark, glacial, gut-fluttering notes. “It’s the kind of slow and textural study that I’ve been practicing over the last two decades,” Guðnadóttir tells me, summarizing the piece as “slow glissandos that swim together.”
The 2026 Reykjavik Arts Festival offered a victory lap for Guðnadóttir, whose achievements on the world stage have indirectly made her a representative of the island as a wellspring of human artistic expression. At the same time, her concerts also represent a homecoming. The last time Guðnadóttir performed in Iceland was in 2014, the release year of her fourth solo album Saman. By then, she was exhausted from performing and traveling, not just in her place of origin.
“It can be so draining,” she says. “I really love what I do, so I have this tendency of taking on a little too much. I call it ‘playing Tetris’ with my calendar.” This fatigue, plus the birth of her son in 2012, caused her to take a hiatus from performing and instead focus on composing new music specifically for visual media.
“It was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me,” she says. “I wasn’t really planning for it, but it came really naturally for me because I love that sort of collaboration, when you get to translate stories.”
Back in her home country now after 12 years, Hildur Guðnadóttir feels the love from the locals. “It’s so special to represent my country on the world stage,” she continues. “It’s bizarre that we have so many artists and places on the world stage, because we really are very few people. It’s such a small island and our resources are so limited. We share a common language, but it also goes beyond words. There’s a sense of rejoicing for each other on the world stage.”
Nowhere is that sentiment clearer than at this festival, during this trio of concerts dedicated to Guðnadóttir’s two-decade-long career. At Nærmynd’s end, capped by an encore of Joker‘s “Bathroom Dance”, the crowd responds with a standing ovation. It would be the first of many over the festival weekend.
Two days after Nærnymd, in Harpa’s smaller Silfurberg chamber, Hildur Guðnadottir and six of her close musician friends contrast the filmic orchestra concert with performances of her original non-score work. The set was dominated by a full rendition of her 2025 album WHERE TO FROM, Guðnadóttir’s return to her solo discography since Saman. As with so much of her work, WHERE TO FROM moves glacially, and the silences are just as important as the sounds.
“I’m very naturally craving not having notes all the time,” she says. “Having the space between the notes creates space in the room it’s being played in.” The space she creates befits the dark chamber, where she sits titanic in a simple long-sleeved gown blue as basalt. Lighting designer Theresa Baumgartner casts the audience in thick rays of kaleidoscopic radiance that seemed to emanate directly from the cellist. The response afterward was the same as the first concert: multiple minutes of effusive praise from a gracious populace.
The following evening, Guðnadóttir sits inside the grand cathedral Hallgrimskirkja as a choir of 50 sings her arrangements in between those of influential 20th-century Icelandic composer Jón Nordal. The programming couldn’t have more effectively sewn her into the country’s tapestry of cultural icons. The material also couldn’t have been more curiously juxtaposed.
Take Nordal’s bookending compositions, both tied closely to the church’s history and purpose. At the top, played by Björn Sólbergsson on the giant pipe organ towering over the congregation, is the restless “Toccata:” a benchmark of Icelandic organ music dedicated to the late Páll Ísólfsson and written specifically for this specific organ’s inauguration into Hallgrimskirkja four decades prior. Sólbergsson plays as though he is clearing out the pipes, running up and down the keys at frightening speeds before settling into stern, solemn chords.
At the end lay “Óttusöngvar á vori”, a suite wherein Latin texts (“Agnus Dei”, “Kyrie”, “Sanctus”) and intermezzos precede an evocation of Matthías Johannessen’s “Sólhjartarljóð”, a poem written in 1983 for the millennium of the Icelandic adoption of Christianity. The composition weaves Icelandic and Latin phrases in harmonic bliss, with its climax literally dedicated to Christ as a fount of life.
In between, Guðnadóttir’s three pieces play like a counterpoint — or, in some sense, a counterargument — to Nordal’s zealous euphoria. Her subjects are real humans, many still alive and suffering today. “What is the Matter”, from 2022, sets the tone as, in filmmaker Ari Kristinsson’s words, “a direct yet thoughtful response to the overwhelming upheaval and division in society and human relations in recent years.” The minous “Folk fær andlit” (2020) answers that generality with a pointed indictment of the deportation of terminally ill Albanian children, and their families, by the Icelandic government in December 2015.
“It was miserable to watch the events unfold, how people divided into two distinct camps: for and against people,” she said at the time. The concluding rendition of Chornobyl’s “Vichnaya Pamyat”, named for a Ukrainian phrase long associated with funereal rites in the Eastern Orthodox Church, neatly segued into Nordal’s epiphanic suite. As soon as the last notes of “Sólhjartarljóð” fade, the applause from the pews reverberates long through the cathedral’s laryngeal nave.
Hildur Guðnadóttir is unquestionably grateful for that adulation, especially from her own people. “I feel it so strongly,” she says. “It’s unexpected because I’d been writing music in my head for 15 years and not many people were paying attention, so it was quite a surprise. But people have been so supportive and so joyful for what I’ve been doing.”
Her words reiterate that it’s citizens, more than anything, that make a nation. Even during her distance from Iceland, she maintained deep connections with her homeland’s artists, from experimental electronica band Múm to fellow composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, the latter of whom indirectly shaped her path as a film scorer. Many of the performers in the orchestra are people she’s shared an education with, learning how to play her cello alongside them. “Playing with people that you’ve grown up with is incredible, especially when you’re playing for family and relatives and friends,” she says.
”When I look back and figure out what I deeply appreciate, it’s those friendships that I’ve built. Listening to each other and playing with each other…that’s the thing that matters the most to me.”
What becomes evident over the course of the weekend’s concerts, and from speaking to Hildur Guðnadóttir, is that “listening to each other” lies at the core of her ethos as an artist. To her, listening is a holistic practice of conscious engagement that manifests empathy, humility, and mutual respect.
“At the heart of all my music is the practice of listening in a kind of non-judgmental way,” she stresses. “A lot of the time, when we listen, we listen with something in mind. We all have the experience of talking with someone and only paying attention to what we’re going to say next. There are little ways we can all practice listening, catching ourselves in those moments. The more we listen, the deeper we listen. The better we listen, the better we can communicate. It’s the best way to translate that idea.”
During Nærmynd, when Guðnadóttir takes the microphone after two songs, she addresses the audience not in English but in her native tongue. Swiftly rolled r’s and dental fricatives caked in reverb spill out of the speakers. These are not words meant for American journalists like me but for the lucky few in attendance, itself a small subset of the mere hundreds of thousands living in the country. I later learned via translation that what lay bare within her gentle words of gratitude is that very same message: listen deeply, take in her music with entirety, and then do the same with each other.
It isn’t coincidental that she followed her words with the outlier of the concert: Alvin Lucier’s experimental “Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra”. A lone percussionist stands at the center of the stage and plays a single note on a lone amplified triangle, stretching the tones in seemingly infinite ways. At its start, crystalline idiophonic waves fill the room, crashing into the ears and goading them to follow the progression of disparities.
At times the percussionist’s hands mute the resonant metal to silence the dissonant overtones. At others, he slams the beater into the side of the instrument as if trying to tattoo our eardrums with daggers of pitch. Eventually he lightens his touch, tapping slower and slower, until the very last waves of music dissipate like an exhale.
Some would hesitate to call the piece music. For Hildur Guðnadóttir, it might be as perfect as music gets.