Donnacha Dennehy: Grá agus Bás

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[Grá agus Bás]...is a powerful symbiosis of old and new: modal inflections and reflections driven forward by muscular post-minimalist patterns and processes. — Gramophone Magazine, August 2011 More…

Release Date: 9th May 2011
Catalogue No: 7559797727
Label: Nonesuch
Length: 58 minutes

Gramophone Magazine

August 2011

Editor's Choice

Dennehy: Grá agus Bás

Work length24:28

Album only

Donnacha Dennehy, Iarla Ó Lionáird (vocals)
Crash Ensemble
Alan Pierson

Dennehy: That the Night Come

Work length34:17

$7.80

$10.20

Donnacha Dennehy, Dawn Upshaw (vocals)
Crash Ensemble
Alan Pierson

He wishes his Beloved were Dead

Track length4:06

$1.30

$1.70

The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

Track length3:13

$1.30

$1.70

The White Birds

Track length8:33

$1.30

$1.70

These are the Clouds

Track length3:28

$1.30

$1.70

Her Anxiety

Track length5:45

$1.30

$1.70

That the Night Come

Track length9:12

$1.30

$1.70

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About

Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, 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.

Dennehy's work has been performed at many prestigious new-music events, including Lincoln Center's Sonic Evolutions and the London Sinfonetta's State of the Nation at the South Bank Centre. He has received commissions from, among others, the BBC, Ireland's RTE, and New York's WNYC (creating a piece for the Bang On a Can All-Stars).

Reviews

August 2011

[Grá agus Bás]...is a powerful symbiosis of old and new: modal inflections and reflections driven forward by muscular post-minimalist patterns and processes.

19th May 2011

[Grá agus Bás is] 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...[are] exquisitely shaped and perfectly conceived for Upshaw's voice.

Donnacha Dennehy: Grá agus Bás

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