Orphée

Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Orphée is in good company. The roll call of composers who have been attracted to the Orpheus myth is as distinguished as it is disparate—Monteverdi, Harrison Birtwistle, Gluck and Philip Glass among them. Jóhannsson’s, however, is not a linear retelling: released in 2016, two years before his death, what would prove to be his last solo album orbits around the story, ducking in and out to retrieve fragments for subsequent consideration. These fragments are bound up with notions of transition, endings and beginnings. Partly inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (which supplies text for the final track, a haunting Orphic hymn), and by Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheus, Jóhannsson used as his starting point a sequence of chords climbing in slow motion towards the light. The soundworld is instantly recognisable, deploying strings in various configurations, plus keyboards including organ and electronics; but "A Deal with Chaos" is initially pared back to solo cello, almost like refracted Bach, and "Flight from the City" is dominated by the piano’s obsessive refrain, which provides a framework for interventions, plangent and tentative, questioning and reassuring. Four qualities that calibrate the disc’s emotional thermostat.