Daníel Bjarnason

• Born: February 26, 1979 in Iceland

©Saga Sig

Violin Concerto

• Composed: 2017
• Premiere: August 22, 2017 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Pekka Kuusisto, violin 
• Instrumentation: solo violin, 2 flutes (incl. piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (incl. bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, congas, glockenspiel, roto toms, snare drum, temple blocks, tom-toms, xylophone, piano, strings
• CSO notable performances: These performances are the work’s CSO premiere.
• Duration: approx. 20 minutes

Among Iceland’s leading musical figures is conductor, composer and curator Daníel Bjarnason, born in 1979 and trained in Reykjavík before taking his advanced studies in conducting at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany. Bjarnason’s compositions—works for chamber ensembles and for orchestra, songs, choruses, film scores, music for dance, and the opera Brothers, based on Susanne Bier’s 2004 film—have been performed by the major Scandinavian orchestras and in London, Paris, New York, Cincinnati, Detroit, Ottawa, Hamburg and other music centers across Europe and America. Bjarnason has had an especially close association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose “Reykjavik Festival”—an eclectic, multi-disciplinary, 17-day event in which he was featured as conductor and composer—he curated in 2017. 

Bjarnason composed his Violin Concerto in 2017 for the Finnish virtuoso Pekka Kuusisto; Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in its premiere at the Hollywood Bowl on August 22, 2017, during that very same “Reykjavík Festival.” Kuusisto performed the work widely in Europe and America thereafter and recorded it with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction in 2020. The Concerto was first performed under the title Scordatura (from the Italian for “out-of-tune”), indicating a deliberate mistuning of one or more strings. The scordatura in Bjarnason’s work, now titled simply Violin Concerto, tunes the violin’s G string, the instrument’s lowest, down to D, the pitch that serves as a root, a reference point, throughout the work’s continuous, 25-minute duration. 

The soloist begins alone, whistling along with a quiet tune plucked note-by-note on the instrument. Those lines diverge and the orchestra enters, hesitantly at first but with slowly increasing challenge to the soloist. The violin reclaims prominence with a tiny solo cadenza, after which the orchestral strings ethereally echo the work’s opening tune. The brasses then draw more aggressive music from the ensemble, which the soloist again subdues into a quiet, icy passage that is reduced to a soft rumbling in the timpani. The bent, sliding notes and strange bowing effects of the partly improvised cadenza that follows offer other types of “scordatura.” The next section begins tentatively in pizzicato basses and regathers some energy, but gives way to another solo cadenza, this one recalling the glassy sounds and whistling of the opening. The orchestra tries to build to a vigorous close, but it is repeatedly overtaken by the soloist’s calming, repeated notes, and the Concerto evaporates into whisps of ascending sound, as though the music were being released from earthly restraints.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda