Þórhallur Auður Helgason

Þórhallur is a member of M’ANAM

Þórhallur, known as Þórhallur Auður Helgason by close friends and family, is a better singer than he is a self-promoter. When asked to deliver such important material - vital for his continued employability - he will generally return something tepidly humorous and mostly irrelevant, way past the deadline. If anything, the fact he gets away with this is a testament to his singing prowess.

Þórhallur studied both the piano and the violin from an early age, transitioning into singing in his early twenties. He studied under Þórunn Guðmundsdóttir at the Reykjavík School of Music and continued his education at a higher level at the Musik und Kunst Private University of Vienna. The result of his two year stay there was a confident announcement that he would never sing again publicly. He has since confidently withdrawn this statement.

Þórhallur is the chairman of a small opera company, Óður, in downtown Reykjavík which aims to make the artform appetizing to the uninitiated*, while also respecting its origins as a complete mess. At the time of writing, he has been cast as the leading tenor in every single production and generally portrayed very favourably. He sings tenor with M’ANAM, Anúna and several local groups in Iceland. He has also recorded vocal scores for BBC’s Frozen Planet II and the video game God of War: Ragnarök, which won Best Score & Music at the 2022 Game Awards.

Alongside this he pursues a masters degree in Computer Science, having worked both at the University of Iceland and at the California Institute of Technology on developing new bioinformatic algorithms to glean bacterial species and strains from genomic sequencing data. In the future, he’ll hopefully follow through on his long term goal of becoming a published writer, though if the past decade is anything to go by, he won’t.

*plebs ✝

✝ you know, morons