Born in 1979, Daníel Bjarnason is one of Iceland’s most versatile exports. A leading composer, conductor and pianist, he’s well-known for blurring the lines between classical, ambient and post-rock music, though his works for orchestra fall definitively into the first of those categories. His work as artist-in-collaboration with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra has won him worldwide acclaim, including as an imaginative curator, while important compositions include the violin concerto Scordatura, the 2010 album Processions and the opera Brothers.

As an in-demand international conductor, Bjarnason works regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and is a noted champion of his homeland’s finest composers, including the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir. Most recently he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra for Rosalía’s award-winning, genre spanning album Lux. As a member of the Bedroom Community collective, he collaborates with fellow Icelanders, from Sigur Rós to Víkingur Ólafsson.

This album, comprising three substantial works, is a representative sample of his recent large-scale compositions, a riot of imagination and orchestral colour. The opener is FEAST, essentially Bjarnason’s Second Piano Concerto, which Ólafsson premiered in 2022. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death, and laced with echoes of the global pandemic, it is bound together by recognisable musical motifs and sports a strong narrative element.

Opening with the bustle of Prince Prospero’s party, there’s a creepy chromatic section for the arrival of the sinister masked figure, a rumbustious mummer’s dance and a granitic danse macabre with echoes of Rachmaninov. A skeletal procession concludes as the concerto dissolves to nothingness. Frank Dupree is the imposing soloist here, a pianist with a proven track record when it comes to contemporary music. Deftly balanced by the Dorian engineers, textural clarity adds to the enjoyment of Bjarnason’s multihued orchestration.

There’s a similar mythical medievalism behind Inferno, a three-movement percussion concerto premiered in 2022 and revised in 2024. Based on Dante, though devoid of any direct internal narrative, it journeys from the pitched, marimba-led sound world of “The Bells” (deliciously woody and disturbingly arrhythmic) through “The Passage” (a sonorous movement driven by ominous timpani) to the eerie clatter of “Dark Shores”. The latter features the txalaparta, a traditional unpitched Basque instrument comprising a set of wooden planks. Vivi Vassileva is the dexterous soloist, with Bjarnason conductorly ear for detail drawing attention to every timbal pleasure.

In between comes Fragile Hope, Bjarnason’s 15-minute tribute to his friend and colleague Jóhan Jóhansson, whose premature demise in 2018 hit Iceland’s close-knit artistic community hard. Premiered in 2024, the composer describes the score as “a reflection on the beauty [Jóhansson] brought to the world, through both light and shadow.” It’s the most typically “Icelandic” work here, opening with the grumbly graunch of low strings and featuring weighty drumbeats and microtonal shifts in pitch. 

Moving with the measured tread of tectonic plates it possess considerable beauty, even managing to find room for a reference to Odi et Amo, a signature Jóhansson work written for the Icelandic play Englabörn and featured on the composer’s breakthrough 2002 album of the same name. Bjarnason is typically authoritative, conducting the excellent Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and the resonant recording, as throughout, is state of the art.

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Composer: Daníel Bjarnason
Works: The Grotesque & The Sublime
Performers: Frank Dupree p, Vivi Vassileva perc, Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Daníel Bjarnason
Label: Dorian Sono Luminus DSL92287