Icelandic conductor and composer Daníel Bjarnason has joined forces with his longtime collaborators, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, to release a new CD of his own works, including the world premiere recordings of concertos for percussion and piano.

The Grotesque and the Sublime, recorded in 2025, provides a thrilling survey of a unique compositional voice that has emerged from the fecund landscape of Icelandic composers such as Jóhann Jóhannson, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Ólafur Arnalds, and Anna Þorvaldsdottir. This disc, released on Sono Luminus, shows Bjarnason’s music to be of a kind with his fellow citizens, but also entirely his own. As musicologist Andrew Mellor puts it, ​“Bjarnason’s own music has long sprawled beyond the borders of the school’s distinct aesthetic”.

The central track, Fragile Hope (published by Birdsong Music Publishing), is Bjarnason’s tribute to Jóhannson, his friend and peer, and a giant in the Icelandic compositional movement. It is flanked by two concertos, for which two equally genre-bending, progressive artists have been recruited. The first is FEAST, Bjarnason’s second piano concerto. Frank Dupree brings his signature versatility and enthusiasm to Bjarnason’s twisting score that ultimately draws inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death. Beginning with a single rising motif, the music threads its way through Poe’s narrative, and Dupree balances nimbly between dark and light — grotesque and sublime.

The album closes with Inferno, a percussion concerto, played by Vivi Vassileva. The piece positions Vassileva as a central figure journeying through the underworld, passing rhythms, dances, and motifs back and forth with the orchestra, while the soloist moves deftly between instruments, searching for the light.

The Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, led in all works by Bjarnason himself, plays with an innate understanding of the composer’s language, and he steers them musically and skilfully through the complex textures of the scores.