The Icelandic composer Haflidi Hallgrímsson has lived in Edinburgh since 1977.

Never to be forgotten: my first meeting with Haflidi Hallgrimsson's music. In 1987 at the Edinburgh Festival the astonishing Helsinki Junior Strings (astonishing because they execute each note as if their lives were at stake) with conductor Géza Silvay played Hallgrimsson's Daydreams in Numbers. Here was a unique aural imagination and intensity of transforming workmanship. Music which stretched its virtuosic young performers to their limits but which was immediately accessible. Physically exciting music, incorporating folkloric elements yet entirely unnostalgic: purged, unsentimental, full of Northern lights and colours of all temperatures. The lullaby was sung at the glacier, the winged horse rose from the sea. These pieces breathed the fresh ‘air of other planets’. They moved in fluid dreamtime: utterly strange, entirely new, yet paradoxically familiar and friendly.