The Grotesque & The Sublime

Daníel Bjarnason is a hub-like figure in the group of composers who could be said to constitute a First Icelandic School. But he also stands slightly apart from his peers. As the nation’s unofficial kapellmeister, he has premiered and recorded works by its central protagonists including Anna Thorvaldsdottir, María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir and others (notably on the Sono Luminus series Recurrence, Concurrence and Occurrence). But Bjarnason’s own music has long sprawled beyond the borders of the school’s distinct aesthetic and incorporated non-abstract forms such as opera.

While some Icelandic orchestral music enacts a gradual transformation on a vaporous orchestra, akin to the shifting shape and colour of a North Atlantic cloud, Bjarnason’s formative orchestral works often cleave to a solid, defined musical object which might be distorted or obscured before emerging again intact. His music has never shied away from the slow, drone-lagged music of Icelandic archetype but it has also used more varied tempi and more urgent rhythmic profiles. It has also deployed different time scales in parallel – notably in works such as Emergence and From Space I Saw Earth, in which planes of music operating at different speeds momentarily sync. This brings to his music a sense of what the late Danish composer Per Nørgård described as ‘the timeless forces of existence – nature in the broadest sense.’

Those works had their roots in breakthrough concertos for cello and piano, Bow to String and Processions, both of which thrive on the process of expanding strong, fertile material by zooming deep in or stretching wide out – a more thematic, less spectral approach than that of Icelandic fashion but one that still sees Bjarnason reveling in the properties of sound itself. The composer’s storytelling instincts lie behind the satisfying dramatic through-line that can be sensed in many of his works and which is often realized by the carrying of one musical idea through to an end point.

Iceland Symphony Orchestra
Daníel Bjarnason, composer & conductor
Frank Dupree, piano
Vivi Vassileva, percussion