Daniel Bjarnason & Nadia Sirota Set for SPCO's Liquid Music Series, 5/6

On Tuesday, May 6th, at Amsterdam Bar & Hall, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Liquid Music series presents Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason and violist and new music champion Nadia Sirota, featuring concert centerpiece Sleep Variations by Bjarnason for Sirota and chamber ensemble. They will be joined by the Minneapolis Music Company in their debut performance.

Daníel Bjarnason created his stirring viola concerto Sleep Variations expressly for widely-heralded violist Nadia Sirota, which Music Press Daily called "14 minutes of sonic tossing and turning that is likely to be considered one of the greatest triumphs of his career." Co-founder and chief conductor of the Isafold Chamber Orchestra and Composer of the Year recipient at the Iceland Music Awards (2012), Bjarnason's music is "the sound of fire and instinct, the musical equivalent of a controlled burn" (The Silent Ballet).

Nadia Sirota, "the beating heart of radical modern classical music" (PopMatters), will also present music from her sophomore album Baroque. The 2013 release has been called "a mind-blowing collection" (Chicago Reader), "technical and beautiful music of a higher order than anything else you will hear this year" (PopMatters), and was named one of the top 10 classical and new-music albums of the year by Time Out Chicago.

As a part of the evening's performance, the Minneapolis Music Company, led by Artistic Director Mischa Santora, will make its debut with ten of the Twin Cities' finest and decidedly flexible instrumentalists (including The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Sunmi Chang, Nina Fan and Sarah Lewis) joining Sirota for Sleep Variations and The Night Gatherers by NY-based composer Judd Greenstein, whose music is "beautifully wrought and consistently appealing" (The New York Times).

About the performance, Sirota commented, "I'm super excited to perform Sleep Variations at Liquid Music in May. The piece is so good. Daníel is a phenomenal composer and this piece is a great intro to his work: smart, well-proportioned, inventive and SATISFYING. I've played it a ton of times with the multi-tracked backing material that I recorded in the past, but I can't wait to play it with live, breathing, human musicians. I imagine the piece'll have even more breadth than it already does! Liquid Music is a perfect fit for this project, and I'm psyched to bring this work to the Twin Cities!"