About Icebreaker
Since giving its first concert in York in 1989, Icebreaker has performed throughout the UK and Europe and at major contemporary music festivals including Meltdown (Southbank Centre, London), Sonorities (Belfast), Gaida (Vilnius), NYYD (Tallinn), the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and others in Warsaw, Aarhus, Gent, Grenoble and Budapest, as well as a dedicated Icebreaker festival in collaboration with the Wiener Musik Galerie in Vienna. Frequent visits to the USA have included appearances at the Bang on a Can Festival and Lincoln Center Festival in New York, and a performance at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra in Stewart Wallace’s The Book of Five.
The ensemble’s repertory – both in concert and on disc – encompasses some of the best known and most influential names in contemporary music, among them Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Philip Glass. Tanzwerk Nürnberg, the West Australian Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet of Seattle have used Icebreaker’s recordings to accompany their performances and, in 1998, Ashley Page created Cheating, Lying, Stealing for The Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells, featuring Icebreaker as guest performers, a programme which has twice been revived for Scottish Ballet; AtaXia, a collaboration with Wayne McGregor’s company Random Dance, based on Michael Gordon’s Trance, was given its premiere at Sadler’s Wells, London, in 2004 with further performances the following year in Amsterdam, Bruges and New York. More recent projects include concerts to celebrate the 70th birthdays of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Louis Andriessen and, last summer, the premiere of a new arrangement of Brian Eno’s classic album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks at the Science Museum IMAX cinema in London, with Al Reinert’s film For All Mankind, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, a project which will continue to tour in the UK and Europe later this year. Since 2005 Icebreaker has had a monthly internet radio show on totallyradio.com, juxtaposing its own recordings with an eclectic mix of music from a wide spectrum of other genres.
