It isn't rare for classically trained musicians to cross into indie, but moving the other way is trickier. Icelandic pianist Ólafur Arnalds, a young composer of shadowy, wistful, slow-paced chamber music, is making it work. He began as a teenaged hardcore drummer with an illicit love of classical and film music. His efforts in that vein earned him a solo deal with Erased Tapes, home to likeminded artists such as Peter Broderick. Touring with Sigur Rós raised his public profile, and in recent years, Ólafur has shown signs of breaking free from indie-classical limbo, securing elite commissions (a score for the great choreographer Wayne McGregor) and signing with Mercury Classics, a new classical label that lacks the prestige of Decca or Deutsche Grammophon but adjoins them via parent company Universal. He achieved all this off the conservatory track, which may account for the composer's ample immediacy and wanting complexity alike.
Ólafur works in blacks and whites. His musical atmospheres might be fairly abridged with the images "night" and "snow;" his releases swing from casual song-a-day EPs to hermetic, formal LPs and back again. The established foundations are intact on For Now I am Winter: the bitterly romantic strings melting over sparsely chorded rows of simple, chiming piano intervals; the faintly dated electronic production nicked from trip-hop and IDM. The album recalls Valgeir Sigurðsson's Architecture of Loss, except with the dense harmonic storminess blown off. But you can certainly hear major label resources at work. Ólafur handles the laptop and keyboard instruments but contracts out a group of strings, winds, and brass from the Iceland Symphony Orchestra; the porcelain voice of Arnór Dan; and orchestral arrangements by Nico Muhly, who reasonably responds to Ólafur’s material with dramatic yet musically cautious accompaniment.
If you crave morose, impressive beauty, it's here. But for a statement on a new classical label, this sounds a lot like a stirring score in search of its ballet or film. There is startlingly little virtuosity written in the compositions, especially in the piano, where it can be hard to distinguish minimalist profundity from undeveloped themes. The strings and winds are more mobile, but Ólafur still keeps his players working through routine harmonic progressions at a pace so stately it's almost robotic.
The biggest change here is the addition of Arnór Dan's vocals on four songs, which like the music are beautiful and pristine to a numbing degree, at least in this low-contrast context. Making his first appearance over a glacial piano and shimmering pads, he sounds like Antony Hegarty evacuated of wildness and swing-- though he does free up as the arrangement flourishes. He turns in some terrific ornaments halfway through "Old Skin", a pretty indie-pop tune that sounds like Lost in the Trees with a sultry-chaste dash of Tom Krell. He's a talented guy, and can seem to be addressing his talent more than the listener. Whereas singers you can really feel make their voices a medium something passes through, Dan's voice here is more of a carefully wrought thing unto itself-- a very fine vase on a very high shelf.
This may all sound grimmer than it is. For Now I am Winter is competent, reasonably varied, and efficiently rousing. Muhly effectuates some pleasing motion in the strings and winds. Opening track "Sudden Throw" is compelling, and while its intrigue fades in the driving cinematic wallpaper of "Brim", that darkly shining sinuousness rises again in "Only the Winds". "Reclaim" is a dashing highlight, leaving behind airless dirges and minimalist ice sculptures for a welcome dance tempo. But the lingering impression that there's not a lot to grasp emotionally becomes stark in the thinnest tracks. My takeaway from "Words of Amber" is that it sounds really nice to pick a winding path through piano scales in a coldly reflective room, while "We (Too) Shall Rest" is a funeral dirge without a subject, a feeling without a focus.
