The centrepiece of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centenary concert in 2019 was a world premiere by Daníel Bjarnason. The score for From Space I Saw Earth requires three conductors – who at the premiere were no lesser figures than Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Zubin Mehta. A few months before the event, Bjarnason described the piece to me in terms of its simplicity: ‘There is more power in simplicity; but by simple, I don’t necessarily mean simplistic.’

To the listener, that simplicity manifests itself as clarity. The only reason From Space I Saw Earth requires three conductors is to delineate its central conceit: an orchestra partitioned along invisible lines, playing three independent versions of the same chorale that interlock and dislocate like the momentary alignment of planets. Anyone familiar with one of Bjarnason’s signature works, Emergence (2011), would have noticed the extension of a characteristic principle: music in which a firm structure – often a chorale or passacaglia – is distorted, bent, decorated or obscured before resolving again, satisfyingly clean and audible. The most important ingredient in all that, says Bjarnason, is ‘trusting your material’, or rather, as he corrects himself, ‘starting with something strong enough’.

It can be tempting to view Bjarnason as a latter-day Wilhelm Stenhammar. So busy is he championing the works of other Icelandic composers as a conductor – notably on the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s landmark album trilogy for Sono Luminus, ‘Recurrence’, ‘Concurrence’ and ‘Occurrence’ – that some don’t think of him as a composer at all. He has conducted around the world, but enjoys special relationships with the podiums of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. With the latter he has been Principal Guest Conductor (among other things) and worked extensively in opera, conducting the ensemble in countless productions from Tosca to Peter Grimes.

In truth, Bjarnason’s own works are among the most interesting, integral and skilfully wrought to emerge from that outstandingly talented crop of composers who form what could be described as the ‘First Icelandic School’. His relationship with the LA Phil has resulted in new concertos for violinist Pekka Kuusisto and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, both works harking back, to some extent, to Bjarnason’s first hit: the thrice-recorded Bow to String (2009, orchestrated 2011, revised 2022).

That work reinforced Bjarnason’s mantra of choosing material you can trust – the notion that if the base ingredient is right, it will blossom in fruitful ways so long as the composer prods and probes it with sufficient diligence. The material in Bow to String is an eight-bar chord progression borrowed from the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, looped with various defacing and distancing effects until it emerges pure again, complete with a residual pathos that packs a massive emotional punch. In 2014, Bjarnason told me he was mystified by the work’s popularity; I suspect his later work has given him some perspective on its straight-talking but fertile qualities – perhaps one reason why he orchestrated it in 2011, replacing the tutti ensemble of multitracked cellos with a full orchestral ensemble.

Emergence does much the same with a chorale, dressing it in hypnotically beautiful orchestration that can either obscure the harmony or turn it glinting towards the light – a blinding but directional light, in the case of the work’s final pages. And so on and so on, in works with the same sound but different music – notably the passacaglia of Blow Bright (2013) and the harmonic melding and smudging of Over Light Earth (2012; where Bjarnason gets closest, perhaps, to the shifting timbral weather systems of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Veronique Vaka).

‘Everything starts with one note,’ Bjarnason said in 2019, ‘even an opera.’ He was referring to Brødre (‘Brothers’), a full-scale lyric drama commissioned by the Danish National Opera in Aarhus, where it was first performed in 2017, the city’s year as European Capital of Culture, before being revived in Budapest, Copenhagen and Reykjavik (where it was recorded for OperaVision in 2019). The opera is based on Susanne Bier’s 2004 Danish-language film of the same name, charting a soldier’s return to Denmark from active service in Afghanistan only to experience the disintegration of his family life courtesy of post-traumatic stress disorder. Bjarnason’s experience working as a conductor at a national opera company shows in the piece’s structure and theatricality. There are echoes of La traviata, Wozzeck and Peter Grimes, a coruscating quartet for four principals and a remarkable musical and dramatic handling of the ever-present chorus, whose own chorales weigh the piece down so evocatively with aural trauma.

Given how rigorously Bjarnason thinks in structural terms, it can be surprising the extent to which he allowed Brothers to be directed by its own human drama rather than the pure music of his favoured devices and patterns. ‘I never felt I was getting caught up in some symphonic whirlwind – what happens to Thomas Adès, the characters carried along on this wave,’ Bjarnason told me in 2019.

The mention of Adès was no coincidence. Tight and deeply satisfying formal processes bind both composers together. There are moments in Emergence that show the influence of Adès’s masterpiece In Seven Days (2008). ‘I have admired him since I started composing,’ says Bjarnason, ‘but I quickly started to see that I couldn’t do what he does, even though I was influenced by it.’ Some might say he has steered refreshingly clear of Adès’s mannerisms and over-literary tendencies.

In the most assured terms, Bjarnason is Bjarnason. ‘One of the hardest things about being a composer is really realising what you are, as opposed to what you want to be or think you are,’ he once told me. That is a tricky business in Iceland, perhaps the nation with the strongest and most distinctive national musical aesthetic right now, one with which Bjarnason enjoys an ambivalent relationship. Much of his music is faster than the slow, drone-lagged Icelandic norm, but much of it is possessed of the reverberating surface tension with which Icelandic composers use acoustic ensembles to ape electronic sounds – one fingerprint of a nation stranded between the rock’n’roll minimalism of America and the symphonic traditions of old Europe; a place where musicians of all genres study together and where Sigur Rós once influenced all. Bjarnason has always added a rhythmic impetus and strong gait to that, while still managing to tap the oscillating melancholy and wonder heard in his colleagues, while also sharing their intriguing ability to sound sincere and focused, while somehow existing between genres.

If we’ve covered some basic foundation stones there, more recent music from Bjarnason has proved that the structures built on top of them continue to evolve in reach and sophistication. From Space I Saw Earth represents a textural refinement hinted at in previous works, one in which whole registers of the orchestra are apparently filtered out (Ligeti makes his influence felt here). The percussion concerto Inferno (2021), written for Martin Grubinger, advances the idea of using rhythmic definition to lubricate other musical processes. The work demonstrates a strong sense of steady harmonic advance and cumulative momentum, as does Feast (2021-22), the piano concerto for Ólafsson already taken up by other pianists. Unusually for Bjarnason outside the opera house, the narrative here is specific: that of Edgar Allan Poe’s short Gothic horror story The Masque of the Red Death. The piece itself is a Totentanz on the idea of a huddle of aristocrats partying privately through a pandemic (shades of two major Adès works and some recent history there). Time marches on courtesy of ticking clocks, tolling bells and – very Bjarnason – a final procession.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Gramophone today