DSO Guest Conductor Leads His Own Music

Daníel Bjarnason leading the DSO in a performance of his “Blow bright” (screen shot from last night’s streamed performance)

Yesterday evening’s live-stream of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) presented a guest conductor with a difference. Icelandic conductor Daníel Bjarnason is also a composer, and he unabashedly chose to begin his program with one of his own compositions. This turned out to be no mere act of vanity, since Bjarnason’s “Blow bright” emerged as the most satisfying work of the evening.

This was very much a large-ensemble composition; but the score disclosed a wealth of engaging sonorities which reflected the composer’s interest in the natural world. In fact, he credited the Pacific Ocean as his influence, which is saying something, since he is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean when he is at his home in Iceland. However, the “Pacific influence” may have been more than an act of nature, since his opening remarks also credited John Adams, who remains one of the most important Pacific coast composers. The sonorities themselves registered easily with the attentive listener due to the video direction consistently drawing attention to the plethora of sources for those sonorities.

On the overture-concerto-symphony program that Bjarnason prepared, the soloist was violinist Leila Josefowicz, who performed the violin concerto by Scottish composer Helen Grime. We often refer to finger-busting keyboard music; but the fingers of Josefowicz’ left hand were given a workout above and beyond the call of duty, matched by the equally demanding bow work. Nevertheless, I came away from listening to this concerto with the sense that it was all challenging technique with little sense of any underlying rhetoric. In the spirit of Japanese wisdom about Mount Fuji, this was an event that deserved to be experienced … but only once.

The concluding symphony was Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 56 “Scottish” symphony in A minor. Mendelssohn was clearly influenced by this country, not only on the mainland but also on the islands and the coastal expanses of the North Sea. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of his music never manages to do justice to any of those influences. Personally, I have to confess that this symphony has influenced me only through the ballet that George Balanchine created, which set only the second, third, and fourth movements of the symphony, using the coda of the opening movement as an introduction while dispensing with everything that preceded it. Thus, while Bjarnason clearly understood Mendelssohn’s own rhetorical foundations as realized through a diversity of instrumental sonorities, there was little he could do to muster an engaging listening experience.