Arctic

The Sony Classical debut album Arctic from internationally acclaimed Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing is a musical journey through the Arctic. It features newly composed music by composer stars such as Jacob Shea (“The Blue Planet”) from Bleeding fingers Music and Frode Fjellheim (“Frozen”). It is scheduled for release on 3 February 2023.

The collaboration between Sony Classical and concert violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing starts off with a unique concept album. Arctic is a musical journey through a stunningly beautiful region and a celebration of a fragile and largely unexplored ecosystem threatened by climate change. “The Arctic is often misrepresented as stark and uninhabitable wasteland,” Hemsing explains. “Yet it’s a region of matchless beauty abounding in life, one that magically illustrates how all things cohere in fragile cycles. Arctic is a musical journey through this unique and endangered natural habitat. I want this project to show people how magnificent and deserving of protection this landscape is, and to point out the threat of climate change, which affects us all.”

The centre piece of the album is the 20-minute “Arctic Suite” by L.A.-based film composer Jacob Shea from Bleeding fingers Music, who joined Hans Zimmer to write the iconic music to “The Blue Planet”, a favourite of millions of music lovers. In the six sections of his suite, Shea depicts the unique natural phenomena of the Arctic, finding melodies for “Frozen Worlds” in winter, the “Aurora” in the polar night and the “Sunrise” in the morning of the polar day. He lends sound to whirling swarms of fish in “Rush of Life” and the poetic whistling of the “Polar Winds” before he ends with a melancholy glance at current environmental changes in “Sea Ice Melting”.

 Arctic was produced by the British Grammy- and BAFTA-winning sound engineer Jonathan Allen (Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Lisa Batiashvili, Andrea Bocelli) and recorded together with the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra in Bodø, a Norwegian town within the Arctic Circle.