Meet Donnacha
A centerpiece of our upcoming Fuse Project will be the world premiere performance of Tessellatum by Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy. I am thrilled that Symphony Space is commissioning this piece, which will receive its first performance in the Sharp Theatre on February 5. This week I thought I’d introduce you to Donnacha and briefly explain what it is about his music that I find most compelling.
My first introduction to Donnacha’s music was through his haunting Grá agus Bás (Love and Death), which caused quite a stir in the musical community here. This piece combines the traditional Irish sean-nós vocal style with a gritty, urban, contemporary sound in an incredibly powerful and original way. Grá agus Bás was written for the legendary Irish folk singer Iarla Ó Lionáird from Afro Celt Sound System and The Gloaming (a group that just happened to appear at Symphony Space earlier this season).
Listen to an excerpt performed by Iarla and the Crash Ensemble from Dublin.
This excerpt doesn’t really do justice to the experience of hearing Grá agus Bás live. When I first heard it three years ago in Zankel Hall, the 25-minute piece had a deeply visceral and emotional impact on me from beginning to end. What is striking about Grá agus Bás is that the music manages to be both timeless and contemporary at the same time. Yes, it sounds Irish, but it is worlds away from what I think of as crossover music; instead Donnacha uses traditional materials as a springboard to create a sound that is as mysterious and elegiac as it is deeply moving. As you can tell, the piece made a big impression on me!
So you can imagine my excitement when I heard through the grapevine that Donnacha was looking for a venue to commission a new work. I leaped at the opportunity — it was a perfect fit for the Fuse Project.
For obvious reasons I can’t share a recording of Tessellatum with you! But I can describe it. It is a 40-minute work for viola, an ensemble of four bass viols, and electronic recording of additional string instruments. (FYI — Viol is a Renaissance string instrument similar to a cello.) The title refers to those cubes of stone used in the making of mosaics, which gives us an insight into the character of the piece. The ensemble plays short repeating melodic cells to create a rich mosaic or tapestry (to mix my metaphors) of slowly shifting color. Donnacha describes these shifting colors as inspired by the way light changes during winter and spring in Ireland, where seasons are defined as much by the way the light changes as by temperature. In preparation for this piece, Donnacha discovered a whole trove of Elizabethan viol music previously unknown to him, and as a result, “the beautiful pungent English cadence of Elizabethan viol music,” as he describes it, also exerts a strange influence over this piece.
I invite you to come on February 5 to hear the first performance of Tessellatum, an important new work by one of the most exciting voices in contemporary music!
