Hildur Guðnadóttir

The Icelandic cellist, singer, and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is an artist who defies categorization and ignores traditional genre boundaries. With her virtuosity, versatility, and originality, she occupies a special place in the contemporary music world. Hildur Guðnadóttir currently enjoys unparalleled international recognition for her work and is the first composer ever to win an Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA in the same season. She also set a new record for the highest number of awards ever won by a female composer in a single season. Her groundbreaking music for the HBO series Chernobyl was awarded an Emmy in September 2019, earned her the title of Television Composer of the Year at the World Soundtrack Awards a month later, and then won the Grammy in the category "Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media" – making Guðnadóttir the first solo woman ever to win in this category. She then also made history with her haunting soundtrack (an "unorthodox cello concerto," The Guardian) for Todd Phillips' dark psychological thriller Joker, for which she received the Golden Globe in the category "Best Original Score (Film)" – the first woman since the category's inception in 1947. After the soundtrack for Joker also received the Critics' Choice Award, the Hollywood Critics Association Award, and the BAFTA Award, all in the "Best Score" category, it then secured Guðnadóttir her first Oscar for "Best Original Score" and in March 2021 her second Grammy in the category "Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media." In October 2019, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and a new single, Fólk fær andlit ("People get faces"), was released along with an accompanying video in January 2020 on Deutsche Grammophon. This touching song, sung by the composer herself, was inspired by the international refugee crisis. Guðnadóttir's Chernobyl album was released in August 2019, and she had also previously worked on recordings for the yellow label with Jóhann Jóhannsson, who passed away in 2018, and composed and recorded a piece for pianist Víkingur Ólafsson's album Bach Reworks. Her four successful avant-garde solo albums – Mount A (2006), Without Sinking (2009), Leyfðu Ljósinu (2012), and Saman (2014) – are now all available on DG, as is her eleven-minute EP single Iridescence. Her older recordings also include soundtrack albums for Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Mary Magdalene (with Jóhannsson), and the Icelandic television series Trapped, among others. Guðnadóttir's latest soundtrack (released on Deutsche Grammophon) was created in 2022 for the film TÁR. Directed by Oscar-nominated director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children) and starring Cate Blanchett in the title role, TÁR tells the story of a (fictional) composer and conductor at the peak of her career. Together with Sam Slater and field recording specialist Chris Watson, Guðnadóttir gave the world's first live performance of Chernobyl at the Unsound Festival 2019 in a disused factory in Krakow. Further live performances by the same team followed in concert halls and more unconventional venues such as a former crematorium. The most recent performance in this series, a charity concert for Ukraine, took place in May 2022 at Kraftwerk Berlin. Since then, Guðnadóttir's The Fact of the Matter had its world premiere at the BBC Proms, with the BBC Singers, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Dalia Stasevska (July 2022). Her music was also featured in the very first Gaming Prom (August 2022). The program included the European concert premiere of parts of the groundbreaking soundtrack to Battlefield 2042, which the composer wrote together with Sam Slater. Hildur Guðnadóttir was born in Reykjavík in 1982, grew up in a musical family, and began playing the cello at the age of five. She first studied at the Music Academy in her hometown and later composition and new media at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Berlin University of the Arts. She has composed music for the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, the Icelandic National Theatre, Tate Modern, the British Film Institute, the Royal Swedish National Opera, the Gothenburg City Theatre, and the BBC Proms, among others. She has participated in performances and recordings by artists such as Hauschka, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Nico Muhly, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Valgeir Sigurdsson, Skúli Sverrisson, and David Sylvian, either as a singer or cellist or with one of the less traditional instruments on which she has made a name for herself, such as the Halldorophone (a feedback instrument) or the Ómar (a six-string electroacoustic cello/viola da gamba). Guðnadóttir was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize as Composer of the Year in 2014 and for a Discovery of the Year Award by the WSA in 2018. In the same year, she received the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Score (together with Jóhann Jóhannsson for Mary Magdalene) and the award for Best Score at the Beijing International Film Festival for Journey's End. In 2019, shortly before receiving the Emmy and the WSA award, she became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 8/2022