The fairytale world of Björk in “Cornucopia”

The Weekend, who sings almost exclusively with a mask on her face on her After Hours til Dawn Tour, or Lady Gaga, who turns into a glamorous mantis on stage at the Chromatica Ball, demonstrate how much surprise Björk caused more than twenty years ago. Marjan Pejoski’s iconic swan dress set a precedent on the red carpet at the 73rd Academy Awards. And what might the elf who came in from the cold surprise us with, now that pop culture seems to have caught up with him? The answer is entrusted to the “Cornucopia” tour, which Miss Guðmundsdóttir, as she is called in the registry office, brings into the stands of the Unipol Arena on Saturday at 20:30 to confirm the idea of ​​nature born of singing. And it is in this “locus amoenus”, inhabited by elves, undines, forest spirits, recreated on stage by the Argentine director Lucrezia Martel, that the most popular Icelandic woman in the world reveals her soul as a child singer, whom life has delivered from vexation. growth.

Five years after the performance was essentially transported to Caracalla with the Apollonian outlines of flute nymphs and giant lotus flowers, the heroine of “Lent” returns to Italy with the development of this experiment, defined as “the most complex stage development” its music has never took part in the tour. In between less challenging and more festive concerts such as the Björk Orkestral, which the singer put on the agenda at the same time (or almost) with Cornucopia, to reinterpret her repertoire with the instrumental inspiration of a large ensemble. Two examples of the frenetic creative moment in which the new album was not to be missed. After two albums marked by the pain of separation from the famous American artist and director Matthew Barney, such as the painful “Vulnicura” and “Utopia”, Björk, in fact, returned with a lighter and less traumatic project “Fossora”. Despite the time, she continued to contain the family turmoil, of which Covid was the least of the problems. Miss Guðmundsdóttir first lost her mother, Hildur Runa Hauksdóttir, the hippie homeopath who pushed her onto the stage as a child, who died in 2018 and is the subject of much of the new work, then became a grandmother in 2019 and subsequently saw her leave. At home is the actress daughter Isadora, or rather “Doa” (also present in the album along with her older brother Sindri). Events that once again shuffled the cards of her life, bringing her “back to earth,” as the excavator to which the Latin title of the new work refers reminds.

If “Vulnicura” was the album of “shipwreck” and the successor to “rescue”, then “Fossora” is an album of rebirth, associated with the memory of parents, with love for children, grandchildren and the land of fire and ice that boils under their feet. And the chosen metaphor is about the bacterial forms that appear when the fungus dies. Yes, about the mushroom, because everything can be said about the Icelandic diva, except that she does not have a rich imagination. This tenth chapter of the discography that began in 1995 with “Debut” (even if he recorded his very first album, a collection of covers, in 1177, at the age of 11), is a gabber album, a powerful Dutch variation of techno. the nineties, which returns her to the clubber past, although live she draws more than half of her repertoire from “Utopia”, without missing out on 4-5 excerpts from “Fossora” itself and fragments of the past like “Isobel” or “Venus in Childhood”. In short, a show with a touch of techno, even if the superb work of choreographer Margret Bjarnadottirle, James Merry’s masks and the makeup of famous drag queen Hungry make the neologism “trip-hop(era)” seem more appropriate, according to some. The environmentalist message was effective, reinforced on the big screens before an encore with Greta Thunberg’s video message about the future of the planet.