Gier has received national recognition as an advocate for both contemporary classical music and the role of local arts organizations in intercultural community building.
[2] In Columbia University’s presentation of the latter award, Gier is described asa widely renowned conductor who is remarkable in his dedication to contemporary American music.
During this period he led numerous critically acclaimed performances with orchestras in Romania, Poland, Slovakia, and Turkey, including a tour with the State Philharmonic of Košice in former Czechoslovakia.
Gier’s debut performance with the Philharmonic was in the summer of 2000, conducting a program including Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet suite and Bernstein's overture to Candide.
[14] In 2004, Gier was appointed Music Director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (SDSO), which has grown substantially and garnered national attention under his leadership.
[16] The series continued for the next six years, expanding to include residencies with composers John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, Steven Stucky, Zhou Long, and Paul Moravec.
[18] Through reciprocal explorations of the Western classical canon, traditional Lakota music, and contemporary compositions, the LMP has occasioned continuous artistic collaboration in the form of musical partnerships between SDSO ensembles and Native American musicians like Dakota cedar flutist Brian Akipa, the New Porcupine Singers, and the Creekside Singers.
[19][20] Gier also facilitated the creation of the SDSO's Music Composition Academies, an outgrowth of the LMP that began in 2017 and continues to provide annual summer programs for Lakota and Dakota high school students to work with composer-mentors who help each participant compose a piece for string quartet or woodwind quintet.
[23] Cross-cultural collaborations with Arab, Chinese, and South Asian communities, as well as Sudanese and Somali refugee communities, have featured tabla artist Zakir Hussain, oud artist Simon Shaheen, composers Malek Jandali, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long, and the Bernard Woma ensemble.
[24] The Lakota Music Project is the foremost of several SDSO initiatives to receive support through grants from entities such as the Mellon Foundation in 2011[25] and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017.
"[24] Gier's innovative pursuit of audience engagement was the focus of the April 2023 episode of 1A's More Than Music radio program on NPR, "Shostakovich in South Dakota", which details "how Delta David Gier and the South Dakota Symphony framed Shostakovich's wartime Leningrad Symphony in order to maximize its pertinence for his Sioux Falls audience.
Gier's work with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra has received high-profile media attention from such publications as The Wall Street Journal,[16] The Washington Post,[19] and The New Yorker.
[28] In the New Yorker review of the world premiere of John Luther Adams's An Atlas of Deep Time (2022), composed for the SDSO in honor of its centennial, critic Alex Ross praised the ensemble as "one of America's boldest orchestras," highlighting Gier's role in the innovative programming and community engagement that have characterized its growth.
In academia, Gier has served as guest faculty at the Curtis Institute, Yale School of Music, San Francisco Conservatory, and SUNY Stony Brook.
Alongside his work in the U.S., Gier has performed internationally as a guest conductor across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, forming longstanding relationships with orchestras in Costa Rica, Italy, Hungary, Poland, China, and Thailand.
Among his many performances with the latter ensemble are the grand opening of the ICONSIAM mall in Bangkok in 2018[37] and the 2017 TPO Asian Tour in Penang and Yala, Thailand.
[47][48] Its first season comprises a series of discussions of Bach’s St John Passion using musical examples recorded at the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s 2014 performance of the oratorio.