Harpa

After an overnight flight, we are now in Iceland.  Our first tour took us to the Harpa Concert Hall which has been a work-in-progress for more than forty years.  Supported by Russian conductor/pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, Reykjavik planned a great concert hall surrounded by other great architecture.  Boom, bust, bankruptcy and all those design/construction delays intervened between the idea and the completed construction in 2011.  The city held a contest for the name and the winner was a girl named Harpa who won because her name means spring and that is a lovely time of the year.

The building is both a visual and auditorial masterpiece.  The walls are of glass panels, atilt, angled, and tinted.  Much of the source materials are Icelandic.

Our guide is an opera singer and we were pleased with her demonstrating the acoustics by singing arias of Icelandic sagas.  We toured the acoustics hall which had a demonstration of the Northern Lights.

the amplification room with its slatted wood panel walls

and the foyer with 10,000 glass planes that can be lit in color.

Iceland in a Box, a 360-degree movie, took us on a tour around the country.

On our walk home (yes, it’s cold), we paused to get photos

saw the Sun Voyager

a rock with a hole in it

and our hotel.