Ireland: Green Ways

Ireland - Piano Works Volume 3

John Ireland’s piano music, some of the most appealing British piano music of the twentieth century, reflects the composer’s many interests: his love of literature, his interest in paganism and Celtic mysticism, as well as the bitter-sweet regret of the passing of love. irelanThis recording includes Ireland’s Piano Sonata, whose third movement is associated with Chanctonbury Ring on the Sussex South Downs, and the four Preludes, the third of which, The Holy Boy, written on Christmas Day 1913, is one of Ireland’s most popular and touching melodies.

John Ireland

John Ireland Piano Music

John Ireland - The Piano Music

"How can the critics begin to understand my music if they have never read Machen?" This was a question heard to fall on more than one occasion from John Ireland’s lips. Ireland came of a literary family, and literature and literary people played a natural part in the formation of his personality. Most influential of all were the works of Arthur Machen the Welsh writer, who was to Ireland almost what Yeats was to Bax. Ireland had dreamt in fire - after his first encounter with Machen it was only a matter of time before he worked in fire also. In the wake of The House of Souls and The Hill of Dreams a smouldering coal flared gloriously into flame. For Machen loved all memoried things and places, things with a past behind them - and the more remote the past the greater he felt able to partake of them. He hailed from a forgotten country in the West, a land of dark and ancient woods and streams and deep sunken lanes, the ancient Welsh kingdom of Gwent …