Eight years ago, Nonesuch released a disc of Donnacha Dennehy’s music that included the remarkable Grá agus Bás, from 2007, in which the highly decorated, unaccompanied vocal lines of the Gaelic seán nos song tradition were fused with Dennehy’s own musical language, rooted in minimalism and spectralism. That integration of two utterly distinct musical worlds seemed to unlock a new directness in the composer’s work, as if the Irish element was the missing piece in his musical armoury. And though there are not many traces of it in the two more conventional operas that Dennehy went on to compose with playwright Enda Walsh, The Last Hotel and The Second Violinist, it’s to the fore again in The Hunger.
This is the 2018 concert version of what Dennehy calls a “docu-cantata”. It deals with the catastrophic Irish famine of 1845-52, as seen through the eyes of the American philanthropist and social observer Asenath Nicholson, whose Annals of the Famine in Ireland was a contemporary account of its horrors. The longer, fully staged version of The Hunger includes video interviews about the causes and effects of the famine with economists and historians, but for the concert hall, Dennehy concentrates on its musical core, in which he creates a dialogue between Nicholson (sung by soprano Katherine Manley) and a dying Irish man (the seán nos singer Iarla Ó Lionáird).
Effectively it’s a song cycle in five extended parts, in which the musical worlds of the two protagonists gradually merge, while the John Adams-like ensemble writing pulses away beneath them. But it’s not as convincing as Grá agus Bás – in the early parts especially, some of the soprano lines seem rather commonplace, and there’s a sense of detachment from the subject matter, which keeps the listener a bit too much at arm’s length, too.
Also out this week
Sun Rings is one of the many pieces that Terry Riley has composed for the Kronos Quartet. It dates back to 2002, when Riley was commissioned by Nasa to compose a work based on sounds recorded by the Voyager spacecrafts. Riley was writing it at the time of 9/11, and what was planned as a 20-minute work eventually became four times as long, with 10 movements and a chorus in two of them, alongside the quartet and the pre-recorded “spacescapes”. The sequence ends with a movement quoting Alice Walker’s mantra, “One Earth, One People, One Love”. It’s musically very diverse – Hero Danger has echoes of Indian music, Beebopterismo and Planet Elf Sindoori are predominantly melodic, The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour, rhythmically driven. It is eccentric and charming, typical Riley.
