Iceland

This new, thoroughly updated fifth edition of Bradt's award-winning Iceland guide remains the most in-depth guide available to one of the few countries in the world that has no mosquitoes, no ants, no Starbucks and no MacDonalds. Featuring honest, practical information from an author who has repeatedly visited the country over twenty years and is familiar with its language, history and culture, Bradt's Iceland has won the Lowell Thomas Award (the highest travel writing award available in the United States) and provides more context for individual places than any other guidebook, plus frank, investigative hotel and restaurant reviews that hide nothing.

Insight Guides Explore is an illustrated, practical pocket-sized travel guide to Iceland with ready-made cycling, walking and driving itineraries for different interests and themes, backed up by maps and all the practical information you will need for your trip. The easy-to-follow routes will save you time, and help you plan and enhance your visit. This Iceland guide book has been fully updated post-COVID-19.

After winning the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand in 1839 and spending two years in Rome, Gounod should have gone on to study in Germany, but he managed in 1842 to persuade the authorities that he should remain in Rome to work on a symphony. In 1843 he visited Mendelssohn who (while trying to dissuade him from wasting his time on Goethes Faust!) urged him to write another symphony. We do not know how much of the First Symphony Gounod had completed by then, but it is not surprising that Mendelssohn figures as one of the key influences on both symphonies. After performances of individual movements in 1855, premieres were given of the First Symphony on 4 March that year and of the Second Symphony on 13 February 1856. Yan Pascal Tortelier and his Iceland Symphony Orchestra demonstrate outstanding precision and musicality in these unjustly neglected works.