Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Homecoming at Reykjavik Arts Festival Marks a Quiet Return

In early June, Hildur Guðnadóttir walked onto the stage of Harpa’s cranberry-hued hall to sustained applause. She introduced herself as the 2026 Reykjavik Arts Festival’s Artist-in-Residence. It was her first Icelandic performance since 2014, the year of her album Saman, and the audience’s held breath made the occasion feel like a repatriation.

Guðnadóttir has spent the years since becoming one of the most recognized composers of screen music. Her scores for Chernobyl and Joker brought her a Golden Globe as the first solo woman ever to win for Best Original Score, then an Academy Award that made her the first Icelander to win an Oscar in any category. None of this had been performed at home.

The residency’s opening concert, titled Nærmynd (Close Up), assembled arrangements that both expanded and reflected on that distance. She opened with “Blind Sarabande,” a new cello piece built from the “slow glissandos that swim together” she’s been practicing for two decades, joined by a sextet. The set moved between menacing material from Tár, a cover of Mica Levi’s “Love,” and Sakamoto’s theme for The Revenant—a map of influences and achievements.

For an Icelander now indelibly linked to Hollywood, the residency functioned as both victory lap and reentry. The weight of representation was there: an artist who, from a distance, had become a symbol of the island’s creative possibility. But the music, glacial and gut-fluttering, belonged to the room.