Program Notes

DANÍEL BJARNASON
Mvt. III (Emergence) from Emergence (Birting) (2011)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

The composer and conductor Daníel Bjarnason is a central figure in Iceland’s classical music scene who is contributing to the huge influence that his tiny country continues to have on music worldwide. Besides his own compositions that have been championed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and other major orchestras, he has collaborated with artists including the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós and the Spanish pop superstar Rosalía, who turned to Bjarnason to create arrangements and conduct the London Symphony Orchestra for her recent album Lux.

Bjarnason introduced the orchestral triptych Emergence in 2011, conducting the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. The third movement, also called Emergence, spreads its glacially slow material across a large and diffuse orchestra, with each pair of string players reading a separate part (and even then stand partners are instructed to bow freely and not synchronize with each other). The composite result is something that morphs and pulses organically, as boundless and ever-changing as the northern sea and sky.

PHILIP GLASS
Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1987)
Approximate duration: 27 minutes

Philip Glass is one of the founding fathers of the compositional style known as minimalism, although he prefers the term “music with repetitive structures.” In his early career he worked outside of the musical establishment, leading the amplified Philip Glass Ensemble while earning a living driving a taxi among other odd jobs. His breakthrough opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) led to new opportunities in theater and film, but it was not until 1987, at the age of 50, that he was finally invited to compose music for symphony orchestras, beginning with the Violin Concerto commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, led by Dennis Russell Davies. Glass has since made up for lost time, creating a number of orchestral tone poems, concertos and 15 symphonies.

The musical language of the Violin Concerto builds on the same signature patterns of triads and sequences that gave Glass’ operas and small-ensemble works such a distinctive and modern sheen, but in the Violin Concerto these materials feel eerily timeless, echoing the patterned figurations of Vivaldi and other Italian pioneers of the solo. A Baroque sensibility also informs the slow middle movement, with its cycling ground bass supporting delicate, voice-like strands of melody from the violin. A fast finale filled with violin pyrotechnics relaxes into a coda that recalls themes from the earlier movements.

STEVE REICH
Three Movements for Orchestra (1986)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

After a period in San Francisco where he drove a taxi for a living and experimented with tape looping, Steve Reich moved home to New York and found his place within a scene of avant-garde artists. Nobody in the classical musical establishment wanted anything to do with the trance-like repetitions and brain-tickling phasing he was developing (where one line moves slightly faster than another), but he kept himself afloat with odd jobs—including teaming up with fellow composer Philip Glass as furniture movers—and gradually he built up an ensemble of like-minded players and an expansive musical vocabulary of pulses and interwoven layers like those he learned studying traditional drumming in Ghana.

Reich’s first real champion within classical music was NWS Co-Founder and Artistic Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, then a young assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. MTT invited Reich to perform on a BSO concert in 1971, and two years later they repeated their performance of Four Organs at Carnegie Hall, which was greeted with such scorn that the reviewer for The New York Times wrote that “the audience reacted as if red-hot needles were being inserted under their fingernails.” Even after Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians turned out a surprise hit for ECM Records in 1978, orchestras still stayed away, until finally Reich had his first orchestral commission, The Desert Music, which his old friend MTT conducted with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1984.

Reich soon followed up with Three Movements, a piece that Leonard Slatkin debuted with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1986, and which reached a worldwide audience when Nonesuch released MTT’s recording with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1994. Just like in the music for his own large ensemble, Reich designed the piece to center around matched pairs of marimbas, vibraphones and pianos, which are placed closest to the conductor and provide the steady pulse for the orchestra to coalesce around. The strings are also divided into two symmetrical groups, bringing spatial clarity to the interlocking rhythms that gradually emerge out of Reich’s trademark pulsing at the beginning.

The slow middle movement re-interprets material that Reich wrote a year earlier for his Sextet, scored for four percussionists and two keyboard players from his ensemble. The fast final movement borrowed from another recent piece, New York Counterpoint for overdubbed clarinet, and the rhythmic signature that coalesces toward the end came from a bell pattern Reich encountered in West African music.

IGOR STRAVINSKY
Symphony in Three Movements, K073 (1942-45)
Approximate duration: 23 minutes

After having already lived in exile from his native Russia for decades, Igor Stravinsky was distressed to see his professional opportunities in Europe dwindling as the continent careened toward World War II, and his home life in France was upended when his daughter, wife and mother died within a span of months. Meanwhile, commissions from Chicago and Washington, D.C., along with an invitation from Harvard University to deliver a series of lectures, pushed Stravinsky closer to the United States. He moved there with two of his surviving children in 1939, married his longtime mistress Vera in 1940 and settled in West Hollywood in 1941.

Eager for any paying commission, Stravinsky dabbled in such mass-market projects as an arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (soon banned by the city of Boston after his pungent harmonies provoked outrage) and a “ballet” for the 50 elephants of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. He even entertained the thought of scoring films like many of the other new arrivals from Europe, but none of those projects came to fruition. Stravinsky claimed that portions of his Symphony in Three Movements began as sketches for film music, but over the course of three years it grew into a stark and powerful orchestral work, approaching a level of turbulence not heard in Stravinsky’s music since The Rite of Spring 30 years earlier.

Stravinsky actually had The Rite of Spring back on his desk in 1943 to undertake a revision of the climactic Sacrificial Dance, an excerpt that makes heavy use of the same minor-third interval that also dominates the opening movement of the Symphony in Three Movements. After the piano takes a leading role in the first movement, the harp rises to the foreground for the central Andante movement, which apparently originated as an abandoned film score meant to underscore an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

Beginning without a pause, the third movement opens with a grotesque march that Stravinsky acknowledged as “a musical reaction to the newsreels and documentaries that I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers.” The piano and harp both return for prominent solos, helping to initiate a fugue and a final arrival inspired by Stravinsky’s “exuberance in the Allied triumph.”

– © 2026 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece as a collective call for justice.