Donnacha Dennehy - Grá agus Bás (2011)

Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy (b. 1970), whom the New Yorker has called "a star of Dublin's active new music scene," makes his Nonesuch debut with Grá agus Bás. This ambitious set features a pair of dramatic pieces written for two very different but equally extraordinary voices - former Afro-Celt Sound System vocalist Iarla O’Lionáird and American soprano, and Nonesuch label-mate, Dawn Upshaw. Often described as a post-minimalist, Dennehy, says British music magazine The Wire, "has a sound world all his own." Here he uses elements of Irish traditional culture as a springboard to create work with no visible roots - a borderless music that is mysterious and elegiac, as deeply moving as it is utterly transfixing.

Donnacha Dennehy's music had already made a potent synthesis of the pulsing energy of minimalism with the harmonic richness of the spectralists before he grafted onto it the traditions of his native Ireland, in particular the unaccompanied songs of sean-nós, with their highly ornamented vocal lines. The result was the remarkable 2007 Gra agus Bas (Love and Death), in which the voice of sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird was the starting point not only for the vocal lines of Dennehy's work, but for the textures that support and envelop them. It's a piece of startling freshness, with Ó Lionáird's voice at the centre of a seething web of instrumental lines that seems to commute freely between utterly different musical worlds without any trace of dislocation. The WB Yeats settings of That the Night Come, written for soprano Dawn Upshaw and first performed last year, are shaped into a song cycle that may be more conventional than the compelling continuity of Grá agus Bás, but which is exquisitely shaped and perfectly conceived for Upshaw's voice.



Tracklist:

1 Grá agus Bás 24:31
2 That the Night Come: He wishes his Beloved were Dead 4:07
3 That the Night Come: The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water 3:18
4 That the Night Come: The White Birds 8:39
5 That the Night Come: These are the Clouds 3:31
6 That the Night Come: Her Anxierty 5:46
7 That the Night Come: That the Night Come 9:13



Read more about Donnacha Dennehy here.
Read more about the album here.
A video clip of a live performance of Grá agus Bás (conducted by Alan Pierson) is available here.

3% recovery record included

More contemporary American and European music is available at my blog.