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There is often a tension between the poetic and the structural in Donnacha Dennehy’s music. He is attracted to obsessive processes but nearly always breaks them. The intersection between words and music, and the vocal sean-nós (old style) tradition has exerted a strong pull over him too since he was a child. Returning to Ireland after studies abroad, principally at the University of Illinois in the US, Dennehy founded Crash Ensemble in 1997. Alongside the singers Dawn Upshaw and Iarla Ó Lionáird, Crash Ensemble features on the 2011 Nonesuch release of Dennehy’s music, entitled Grá agus Bás. Other releases include a number by NMC Records in London, Bedroom Community in Reykjavik and Cantaloupe in New York. He joined the music faculty at Princeton University in 2014, and now lives in America. In recent years, Dennehy has completed a trilogy of operas with Enda Walsh, The Last Hotel (2015), The Second Violinist (2017) and The First Child (2021). He has also written a kind of “docu-cantata”, The Hunger, for Alarm Will Sound, which was released by Nonesuch in 2019. Augustin Hadelich premiered his new violin concerto in the Netherlands in October 2021.
Upcoming Concerts from Donnacha Dennehy
Featured
Premiere of new version for solo viola and soundtrack
Dominic Stokes, viola
International Viola Congress
Théatre,
Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique,
Paris
Nadia Sirota (viola) and Gabriel Cabezas (cello)
New version for viola, cello and soundtrack
Southern Exposure New Music Series
School of Music Recital Hall
University of South Carolina
Works and Compositions
NEWS
NEWS BLOG
Land of Winter makes best of the year lists from the New York Times, Boston Globe and Gramophone.
“At once vigorously abstract and vividly atmospheric, this musical almanac by Ireland’s most important living composer evokes the changing seasons with glinting high harmonics, restless bass wanderings and shifting soundscapes. Austere on the surface, the music shimmers with subtle energy — like a gray sky that reveals unexpected gradations of color.” New York Times
“In virtually every musical facet — timbre, harmony, structure — it’s shockingly original, while also being compulsively listenable, particularly in Alarm Will Sound’s muscular performance. Boston Globe
Land of Winter was also the focus of a New Sounds show on WNYC, available here.
Land of Winter has been nominated for two Grammys: Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Nonesuch Records have just announced the release of Land of Winter on November 15. Performed by Alarm Will Sound and conducted by Alan Pierson, Land of Winter explores the subtleties of the way light articulates time in Ireland’s seasons via twelve connected sections representing the months of the year. The album track “November” was released on Sep 4 and is available to listen here among other places. There is also a video for this track, directed by Hugh O’Conor and starring Mikel Murfi, released on YouTube. Alarm Will Sound will perform Land of Winter live at the Irish Arts Center in New York on Dec 11 and 12. Ensemble Kontrapunkte will perform it at the Musikverein in Vienna on Dec 5. More info on the album can be found at Nonesuch Records.
I’m very happy to have been awarded a Koussevitsky commission award (August 2024) to write a piece for F-plus.
Augustin Hadelich will be performing my violin concerto at Aspen on July 16, and at Musikfest Berlin with the Konzerthaus Orchestra on September 7. Markus Stenz conducts at Aspen, and Joana Mallwitz conducts the German Premiere in Berlin. (Aspen also co-commissioned the concerto).
Limina, a piano concerto for Eliza McCarthy, premiered at the New Music Dublin Festival in April 2023 with Crash Ensemble. Contemporaneous will present its US premiere at National Sawdust on June 14.
Alarm Will Sound premiered ‘Land of Winter’, an hour-long composition written especially for them, at the Beethovenfest in Bonn on September 14. It will be broadcast on WDR Radio 3 on 8 December. The composition of ‘Land of Winter’ was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Augustin Hadelich and the Oregon Symphony will give the US premiere of my Violin Concerto, written especially for Augustin, on October 8 in Portland, Oregon.
[Photo from Beethovenfest]
The First Child, the final opera in my trilogy with the writer/director Enda Walsh will premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival from 2-9 October. Produced by Irish National Opera and Landmark Productions, it features a cast of Sarah Shine (soprano), Niamh O’Sullivan (mezzo), Eric Jurenas (countertenor), Dean Power (tenor), Emmet O’Hanlon (baritone), Caia Hynes (actor/dancer) and Joan Sheehy (actor). Features a small children’s choir (coached by Elaine Kelly) and Crash Ensemble, all conducted by Ryan McAdams.
Augustin Hadelich will premiere my new violin concerto with the philharmonie zuidnederland on 22nd and 23rd October in the Netherlands. The premiere will be conducted by Claus Peter Flor. The Violin Concerto was co-commissioned by the Oregon Symphony, Aspen Music Festival and philharmonie zuidnederland.
PRESS
Featured
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ‘High-octane triumph … powerful and compelling’
The Sunday Times
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ‘a remarkable conclusion to the Dennehy-Walsh partnership’
The Irish Times
Donnacha Dennehy’s mighty cantata “Gra Agus Bas” (2007), a haunting work of Gaelic folk incantations vocalized by Iarla O Lionaird over a seething, lung-constrictingly tense orchestral fabric. Softly evocative at times, it expands to a deafening roar at a climax of fiery death. Lock me anywhere with that piece, any time.
***** “Mitreißend, spannungsvoll und überraschend: das ist die irische Oper The Second Violinist. …Die erfahrene Gefühlsdichte wirkt noch lange nach.”
***** (Choral and Song choice of the month, November 2019)
“Dennehy’s score is inventive focused and beautiful…arresting and deeply rewarding”
“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.” Continue Reading
"Then a trapdoor opens. The Dowlandesque dissonances thicken further into dense, microtonal chords, creating from the uncanny pure tone of the viol consort vivid, intense new colors: harmonies suggest at once the iridescence and the taste of an old copper pot, or both the rainbow halation of a streetlamp on a misty night and the buzz of its sodium bulb. The effect was hypnotic, and the piece, a single 38-minute movement, could have gone on forever and felt like a moment."
"The Hunger features an eerily spectral, hollowed-out soundscape consisting of convulsive microtonal pulsing in woodwind and brass against uneasy shifting microtonal oscillations, disembodied harmonics and skeletal ponticello in strings… A haunting, illuminating, harrowing, yet subtly gripping work.”
"The Last Hotel unleashes a thrilling musical energy. Dennehy's 12-piece ensemble includes accordion, electric guitar and heavy percussion, and thrums with a savage, unstoppable groove, shouting the unspeakable, seething with emotions that characters are too numb to express."