“Dessner [..] moves fluidly between rock and classical and everywhere in between.” - Guardian
Bryce Dessner is a vital and rare force in new music. He has won Grammy Awards as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger, and co-principal songwriter. He is regularly commissioned to write for the world’s leading ensembles, from Orchestre de Paris to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is a high-profile presence in film score composition, with credits including The Revenant, for which he was Grammy and Golden Globe nominated, Fernando Mereilles’s The Two Popes, Mike Mill’s C’mon C’mon, Bardo, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me.
Dessner collaborates with some of today’s most creative and respected artists, including Steve Reich, who named Dessner “a major voice of his generation.” Dessner’s orchestrations can be heard on the latest albums of Paul Simon, Bon Iver and Taylor Swift.
Bryce Dessner has had works commissioned and premiered by today’s leading conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Semyon Bychkov, and Santtu Matias-Rouvali. This season alone sees performances of his works by, amongst others, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, BBC Symphony Orchestra, HR Sinfonieorchester, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony.
In the 2023-24 season Bryce Dessner is the Creative Chair of Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich. In addition to his role as one of eight San Francisco Symphony Collaborative Partners, Bryce Dessner is currently Artist-in-Residence at London’s Southbank Centre and with Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Dessner’s recordings have received multiple prestigious awards; commissioned by Kronos Quartet; Tenebre, an album of his works for string orchestra recorded by Germany’s Ensemble Resonanz and which won a 2019 Opus Klassik award and a Diapason d’Or; Impermanence (2021) with Australian String Quartet and which won the Libera award.
““—you can hear a furiously complicated musical mind chattering. Dessner’s sensibility as a composer is furtive, urgent, intense.”
“But Dessner’s mordant vision is uniquely his; these are real, meaty works, troubling and beautiful.””
“....the New York Philharmonic gave the New York premiere of a double piano concerto by a pop artist with classical and indie rock credentials. With the composer in attendance, the piece, lovingly crafted to show off the evening’s soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a strong claim as the evening’s centerpiece.’”
“His harmony is familiarly tonal, but he relishes dissonance and tension, and dances with a visceral rhythmic playfulness. He seems to enjoy turning harmonies upside down, and bouncing them around, examining how they reflect light.’”