Sigur Rós mesmerizes with otherworldly sounds and orchestral beauty at the Met

Since its renovation and reopening in 2018, the Met has secured its place as the most elegant of Philly’s concert venues. On Monday, spirits of its opera house past seemed to awaken as the room played host to the ethereal Icelandic band Sigur Rós, accompanied by the 41-piece Wordless Music Orchestra.

For one night at least, a packed house that would normally be found raucously cheering for the venue’s usual rock fare sat as hushed and reverent as an orchestra audience transplanted from a few blocks south on Broad Street.

Always an otherworldly listening experience, Sigur Rós has, for the last three decades, provided the sonic evidence for that imaginary Iceland that we picture in our minds, full of fantastical landscapes peopled by fairies and elves. Their music feels conjured rather than performed, drifting at a glacial, airy pace. Front man Jón Þór Birgisson, known as Jónsi, sings in a falsetto blend of Icelandic (unfamiliar enough to most American ears) and an invented wordless tongue the band calls “Hopelandic.”

Monday night’s show took those sounds further into a liminal dreamspace, shrouding the enormous ensemble in near-darkness and a veil of smoke. The stage was backlit in solid reds and oranges, with bare bulbs on stands pulsing and flickering throughout the black-clad orchestra. Jónsi, bassist Georg Hólm, and pianist/keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, who rejoined in 2022, clustered at the center around conductor Robert Ames.

The stage may as well have been an infinite void, with the horns and percussionists disappearing into the misty black.

Beginning with a piercing drone from a single bass, gradually echoed and expanded into a delicate shimmer by the string section, opener “Blóðberg” seemed to emerge from that nether region, fading into view with an aching slowness. The song, from the band’s most recent album, Átta, features Jónsi intoning the lyric in a muted, barely more-than-spoken voice. The piece grippingly set the somnolent tone for the evening, met by an almost breathless silence from the crowd.

At their most entrancing, Jónsi’s vocals evoke whale song and the music unfurls with the gravity-defying grace and fluid time of underwater creatures. Its cavernous spaces demand patience, and on record are often dense with subtle textures.

Some of that was captured at moments during Monday’s show when the band came to the fore: Jónsi’s bowed guitar, which largely provided the music’s amorphous foundation, suddenly taking on a bracing, distorted aggression during “Von,” the title track from their debut album, or the shifting dynamics of “Starálfur,” from 1999′s Ágætis byrjun.

Paradoxically, Sigur Rós seems to diminish the more they expand. Too many of the concert’s orchestral arrangements fell back on monolithic lushness, dulling the songs’ fragile intricacies into the blandly pretty. Over the course of two hour-long sets it all became a bit numbing, one piece of delicate mysticism beginning to blur into the next like the relentless darkness of the midnight sun.

A few too-rare flourishes utilized the orchestra as more than ornamentation. The closing moments of “Andvari” were graced by tremulous violins giving a borealis-like sheen to the luxurious long tones, while “Hoppípola” erupted into a circus-like waltz. The Wordless Music Orchestra even belied its name at one point, transforming into a chorus at the opening of “Dauðalogn.”

While the orchestra tended to engulf the band, there were standout instances of interaction. On “Ekki múkk,” the strings bloomed from Jónsi’s singing as if they were an extension of his voice; on “Skel” cellos and feedback merged, while distant horns suggested a vast landscape on “Untitled #3 — Samskeyti.”

“Starálfur” culminated in a bit of grand baroque, all stately strings and triumphant horns. The era proved the touchstone for too many of the performance’s plodding orchestrations, making a band that thrives on the alien into something disappointingly familiar.

Still, the Met crowd was clearly mesmerized, and the evening ended with rapturous applause and a standing ovation.