Dustin O’Halloran’s debut Deutsche Grammophon album, Silfur, explores the shifting perspective of music through time and place in new pieces and re-imagined earlier works.
The album includes collaborations with American composer and multi-instrumentalist Bryan Senti, Icelandic cellist Gyða Valtýsdóttir and the Siggi String Quartet.
“Silfur is an exploration of the music of my past and how it reflects back to me now in the present. Evoking images of different moments, places and periods of my life, and rediscovering the pieces that have stayed with me. Sometimes we can only understand ourselves by looking back, and hopefully, finding the thread of who we are and who we have always been.”
Dustin O’Halloran
Oscar-nominated composer and pianist Dustin O’Halloran releases his debut Deutsche Grammophon album Silfur internationally on CD, vinyl and digitally on June 11, 2021. This new release of fifteen pieces distils and expands upon the composer’s concepts of time, past and present, perceived through music.
It comprises two new works – ‘Opus 56’ for solo piano and ‘Constellation No. 2’ for piano, cello and electronics – as well as new recordings of a selection of tracks from O’Halloran’s solo albums, including four new string arrangements. The first taste of Silfur was revealed on April 6 with the release of ‘Opus 18’ as a single, along with a beautiful live performance video, shot at Reykjavík’s Fríkirkjan church by director Blair Alexander.
Dustin O’Halloran worked on Silfur during the lockdown in Iceland, where he ordinarily spends part of the year. Unable to return to his other home in Los Angeles, he drew inspiration from isolation and Iceland’s unique atmosphere, revisiting works from four solo albums and refining them through the prism of his Icelandic experience. At the first recording session for this album he was given a gift of silfurberg (“silver rock”), a native Icelandic crystal, which inspired its title. “As light enters it,” explains O’Halloran, “it’s reflected into two perspectives. It felt that that’s what I was doing in making this record. And I feel the place you’re in always has a resonance – it somehow comes through the music.”
“I’ve lived with these pieces for many years and performed or returned to them from time to time,” continues O’Halloran. “When Christian Badzura from Deutsche Grammophon asked if I would like to record them again, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go back into my past. But I thought this was a chance to give them more of what I intended. This was an opportunity to try to finalise them in a way that I could put them to rest, because there were things I wanted to see if I could capture. There was a feeling of travelling back in time to my past while experiencing the music in new ways in the present. It’s very special that we can capture time in this way. And I think that’s almost what music is: it’s capturing time. It’s capturing a moment, which we can experience again later.”
Echoes of everyone from J.S. Bach, Chopin and Debussy to Arvo Pärt and Erik Satie can be heard in O’Halloran’s keyboard compositions. His personal aesthetic, gentle and restrained, magnifies the subtle nuances of emotion with acute awareness. In addition to performing ten solo tracks, O’Halloran is joined on Silfur by a number of friends and collaborators. The composer Bryan Senti is featured on the new arrangement of ‘Opus 55’ performing violin. The Siggi String Quartet joins on ‘Opus 28’ and ‘Opus 37’, and also contributes on a new version of ‘Opus 17’ for strings. Alongside this, composer and cellist Gyða Valtýsdóttir is featured on ‘Constellation No. 2’.
O’Halloran, raised between Hawaii and Los Angeles, began to teach himself piano at seven years old. During his years at art college in Santa Monica, he formed a duo with the singer Sara Lov. Their partnership evolved into the indie rock band Dēvics and led O’Halloran to move to Italy where his musical trajectory as a pianist was crystallised. His early solo albums, two volumes of Piano Solos (2004, 2006), were followed by Vorleben in 2010 and Lumiere in 2011.
Over the past decade O’Halloran’s acclaimed ambient music collaboration with Adam Wiltzie, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, has delivered four albums, two soundtracks and Atomos, the latter for Wayne McGregor’s dance company. Their most recent album, Invisible Cities, reached No. 4 in the UK Record Store Chart.
He has reached new audiences with his music for film and television, including scores for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011), winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance; his Emmy Award-winning theme music for the US show Transparent (2014-17); and the soundtrack for George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give (2018). His first soundtrack collaboration with German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann for the film Lion (2016) was nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award. They recently joined forces again to compose the original music for Francis Lee’s romantic drama Ammonite (2020) and their score was shortlisted for an Academy Award this year.
Jeremy [Six Strings]
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