Jón Leifs
Icelandic composer, conductor, pianist and writer Jón Leifs was born at Sólheimar in North-western Iceland on 1 May 1899. He studied piano at the Leipzig Conservatory (1916-21) but decided to devote his time instead to composition and conducting.
During the 1920s he conducted orchestras in Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany and Norway, becoming the only internationally succesful Icelandic conductor so far. He also wrote, in both Icelandic and German, about music and musical interpretation, and began his career as a composer by making piano arrangements of Icelandic folk songs.
During the 1930s he composed many large scale orchestral works, mostly inspired by Icelandic natural phenomena such as Dettifoss, Europe's second most powerful waterfall, and the eruption of the Hekla volcano, which he witnessed.
In the 1940s he was a fierce proponent of artists' rights and music education, working towards Iceland's ratification of the Berne Convention in 1947 and setting up STEF - the Performing Rights Society of Iceland in 1948. He also composed four vocal and choral works dedicated to the memory of his daughter, who died in a swimming accident in 1947, aged eighteen.
Jón Leifs died from lung cancer in Reykjavík on 30 July 1968, aged sixty-nine, a few weeks after composing his last work, Consolation, an intermezzo for string orchestra.
A selection of articles about Jón Leifs
Resounding Echoes by Robert McCarney - Hard Time
Record box - Elemental music. Icelandic works, with Basil Ramsey