Birdsong Music is delighted to announce its latest signing, composer and conductor Daníel Bjarnason. Bjarnason is one of Iceland’s foremost musical voices today, increasingly in demand as a composer, conductor and programmer.

Keeping a busy composing schedule alongside his conducting commitments, many of his works are taken up beyond their premieres and regularly programmed around the world. Last season, two new works saw world premieres: a Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, written for Víkingur Ólafsson, and a Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra, written for Martin Grubinger. His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, ​‘FEAST’ was performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Ólafsson and Esa-Pekka Salonen. His Percussion Concerto was recently performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. It will receive further performances by Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Gothenburg Symphony, SWR Symphonieorchester, hr-Sinfonieorchester and Luxembourg Philharmonic.

Bjarnason’s Violin Concerto ​‘Scordatura’ became a success with audiences and orchestras and remains very popular. Pekka Kuusisto has performed it widely including with Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Swedish Radio and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras among many others.

Since its premiere in 2017, his first opera, Brothers, for the Danish National Opera and directed by Kasper Holten, based on the Susanne Bier film of the same name, was also revived in Reykjavík by The Icelandic Opera in 2018 and opened Budapest’s 2019 Armel Opera Festival. Brothers will be performed again at the Copenhagen Opera Festival in August 2023.

A recipient of numerous accolades, in 2018 he was awarded the Optimism prize by the President of Iceland, won the 8^th Harpa Nordic Film Composers Award for the feature film Under the Tree, and was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize. He also won Composer of the Year, Best Composer/​Best Composition and Best Performer at the Icelandic Music Awards in recent years.

Bjarnason studied piano, composition and conducting in Reykjavík and pursued further studies in orchestral conducting at Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.

We are thrilled to welcome Bjarnason to our roster and very excited to announce Bjarnason’s upcoming projects shortly!