His list of commissions include some of the most celebrated artists of our day including Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Susan Graham, Dawn Upshaw, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, Gary Graffman, Anthony McGill, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the Guarneri and Emerson String Quartets, the New York City, Pacific Northwest and Nashville Ballets, and institutions such as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Maryinsky Orchestra, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and many more. With Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Danielpour created Margaret Garner, his first opera, which premiered in 2005 and had a second production with New York City Opera. He has also collaborated with a number of celebrated writers, including Maya Angelou, Erica Jong, Rita Dove and Stephen Mitchell.

 

He has received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Award, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and The Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin and Rome. He has served on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music from 1997 to 2025, and on the faculty of the Manhattan School Of Music from 1993 to 2017. Danielpour is a Distinguished Professor of Music at the UCLA Herb Alpert school of Music, where he has taught since 2017. 

 

In April 2019, JoAnn Falletta led the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in performances of The Passion of Yeshua, where it was recorded by Naxos. The album was released in March of 2020 to critical acclaim and was nominated for three GRAMMYs in 2021, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition; it won a GRAMMY in the category of Best Choral Performance. In 2019, Danielpour composed five works, the most significant of them being A Standing Witness, a series of 14 songs which are settings of poems written by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove. Composed for mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and Music from Copland House, this 70-minute monodrama which remembers the last 50 years of our American history was premiered at the University of Chicago in October 2021 and later received, to date, 13 performances throughout the country including at the Kennedy Center and at Tanglewood. In 2020, The Oregon Bach Festival commissioned Danielpour to compose An American Mosaic as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was also written to pay homage to the heroes of this crisis. Pianist Simone Dinnerstein gave a live streamed premiere via YouTube and the corresponding album release through Supertrain Records in March 2021 garnered immediate critical acclaim while receiving over 3,000,000 streams on Apple Music alone and was recently nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.
 

In 2021, Danielpour was commissioned by Orchestra Della Toscana to write a piece for the Dante anniversary, making him the first American composer in nearly 40 years to be commissioned by a major Italian orchestra. That same year, clarinetist Anthony McGill premiered Danielpour’s Four Angels with the Catalyst Quartet. The work was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as part of a celebration of Black Lives Mattering in America. In September, he was given a lifetime achievement award from the Cremona Music Festival and later that Fall was awarded the Covel Chair from UCLA to support the composition and production of his new two act opera The Grand Hotel Tartarus, making him only the second recipient of this coveted award.

Premieres in 2023-24 included The Unhealed Wound, a cantata composed for baritone, mezzo- soprano, and chorus, written in collaboration with Rita Dove, was commissioned by Skidmore College as part of a McCormick Residency in September 2023. In October 2023, the ROCO Chamber Orchestra in Houston premiered the first of two newly commissioned works, Breaking the Veil, which was written as a tribute to the heroic women of Iran. ROCO also premiered a second commissioned work, Triptych, which is a three-movement symphony based on The Divine Comedy of Dante. In February 2024, The Golden Bridge Chorus, conducted by Suzie Digby, gave the world premiere of Danielpour’s Agnus Dei in Los Angeles. On May 17, 2024, Danielpour’s full length opera The Grand Hotel Tartarus received its world premiere at the Freud Theater Playhouse in Los Angeles. Danielpour has recently completed a 75-minute oratorio, Francis, based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi. It will receive its premiere with the Buffalo Philharmonic in October 2026 with Music Director JoAnn Falletta.

 

Danielpour is one of the most recorded composers of his generation; many of his recordings can be found on the Naxos of America and Sony Classical labels. Danielpour's music is published by Lean Kat Music and Associated Music Publishers. ​