Chamber Choir Ireland: There is Sweet Music...

Chamber Choir Ireland

IS THE∏E

SWEET MUSIC —1—

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Choir-in-residence Cork International Choral Festival 2021

There Is Sweet Music Conductor Andrew Synnott

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Programme Ralph Vaughan Williams Three Shakespeare Songs Edward Elgar Go, Song of Mine Michael Tippett The Weeping Babe Norah Walsh On a quiet day in the future WORLD PREMIERE (SEÁN Ó RIADA COMPOSITION COMPETITION PRIZEWINNER 2021)

Peter Leavy It will not depart

WORLD PREMIERE

(SEÁN Ó RIADA COMPOSITION COMPETITION PRIZEWINNER 2020)

Gustav Holst The Evening Watch Amanda Feery Longwave FESTIVAL COMMISSION

WORLD PREMIERE

Michael Tippett Dance, Clarion Air Edward Elgar There is sweet music Michael Tippett The Windhover THE PROGRAMME WILL RUN FOR C. 55 MINS —4—

Returning after such silent times for choirs in lockdown,

Chamber Choir Ireland (CICF Choir-in-Residence) presents

a glorious programme of British choral music from the 20th century. The choir is delighted to present the premiere of Amanda Feery’s Longwave using text from the Shipping Forecast – originally commissioned for the 2020 Cork

International Choral Festival and also two prize-winning

entries from the Seán Ó Riada Composition Competition: Norah Constance Walsh’s On a quiet day in the future

(2021 winning entry) and Peter Leavy’s It will not depart

(2020 winning entry). This concert has been programmed

by CCI’s Artistic Director, Paul Hillier who, due to current restrictions, can’t be with us in Ireland for this year’s

festival. However, we warmly welcome Andrew Synnott

as guest director who has had close connections with the

Festival in the past as a former winner of the Séan Ó Riada Composition Competition in 1991!

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Three Shakespeare Songs Ralph Vaughan Williams Full Fathom Five – The Tempest, Act 1 scene 2 Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them, – ding-dong bell.

The Cloud-Capp’d Towers – The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1 The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind: We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Over Hill, Over Dale – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II scene 1 Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire I do wander everywhere.

Swifter than the moonè’s sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green.

The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours: I must go seek some dew-drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.

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Go, Song of Mine Edward Elgar TEXT: Guido Cavalcanti, Trans. D G Rosetti

Dishevell’d and in tears, go, song of mine, To break the hardness of the heart of man: Say how his life began From dust, and in that dust doth sink supine: Yet, say, th’unerring spirit of grief shall guide His soul, being purified, To seek its Maker at the heav’nly shrine.

In tears, go, song of mine, To break the hardness of the heart of man.

The Weeping Babe Michael Tippett TEXT: Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) Copyright

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On A Quiet Day In The Future Norah Walsh TEXT: Peter Sirr Winning entry in the 2021 Séan Ó Riada Composition Competition

Norah Constance Walsh is a Dublin-based composer, musical director, pianist and teacher. She holds a first class honours BMus in Composition from the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama where she studied under Jane O’Leary. Writing for voice and giving musical expression to the human concepts, narratives and emotions captured in text are a central part of Norah’s output. Her choral works have been performed by Mellow Tonics, Laetare Vocal Ensemble, TU Chamber Choir and Rathdown Cantori amongst others, and recent vocal commissions include Inception Horizon and the short opera Beneath Iseult’s Tower.

Norah’s instrumental works have been performed in Ireland and Europe by soloists and ensembles including Duo Sincronia, the Dublin and Delmaine String Quartets and instrumentalists from the RTE National Symphony and Concert Orchestras. Norah’s compositions are acoustic drawing from classical, popular, jazz and traditional Irish genres. Norah also enjoys working as a musical director, curator and facilitator in various community and education projects, and as a choral conductor for a number of television productions.

NOTE FROM THE COMPOSER:

This choral work is a setting of the poem ‘On a Quiet Day In The Future’ by Irish poet Peter Sirr. The poem was written in April 2020, the music in July 2020, during the early stages of upheaval visited upon the world by Covid-19. The work is a reflection on how a house will cope in a post-pandemic world when its inhabitants are less frequently present.

The music follows the contours of the text and the rise and fall of the levels of activity in the house, whilst using space and texture to convey the overall sense of reflection.

For me this poem is an insightful statement on this period, capturing some varied and poignant details of lockdown. It made me think beyond the immediacy of our human concerns, to reflect upon the changes that these times have brought to our environment and our homes. I enjoy the attribution of human sensibilities to the house, in particular the idea of an ‘affronted door’.

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Dedicated to Aidan and Hilda Walsh On A Quiet Day In The Future How will it live without us, this house we fill to the brim?

When the doors are thrown open and we’ve fled for the hills I like to think oppressed by quiet it will listen again to the noise of our days together never closer or more alone replaying our sighs, our laughter the dog on the stairs waiting for deliverance. Let the gate clink, cats preen, foxes march to their own tune.

Out from the walls our music will come, our crowding worlds. Will listen in the rinsed clean Zen of its shell the enclosed order of its days to our daily French, our maths and wine our laptops clicking as if we had yet more to say until voice by voice we fade and the batteries drain from our machines and even the dreaming dust half woken by a sigh of wood turns over and goes back to sleep again.

Poor house then, its sorrow no more our yelping out into the releasing day but the key turning in the affronted door...

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It will not Depart Peter Leavy Winning entry in the 2020 Séan Ó Riada Composition Competition

Peter Leavy is a Mayo-born, Dublin-based composer, pianist, teacher, and occasional jazz musician. He studied piano with Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama from 2001-10 and holds a first-class honours degree in Music (2006) and a Masters in Performance and Musicology (2008) from Maynooth University. Peter completed an MPhil in Composition at Trinity College Dublin in 2013 and a Doctorate in Composition at the University of Birmingham, under the supervision of Prof. Michael Zev Gordon, in 2018. His works have been performed

by New Dublin Voices, Maynooth University Chamber Choir, Ensemble Avalon, The Lír Quartet, and The Birmingham University Philharmonic Orchestra among others.

Compositionally, he is interested in the expressive possibilities of material and structures imported from the musical past, into the musical present. The give-and-take between whimsy and compositional forethought, and the possibility of larger-scale structures emerging organically from the tiniest of gestures are other areas of interest.

NOTE FROM THE COMPOSER:

It Will Not Depart is a short work for choir (SATB). The work is a setting of poetry by the Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien (365-427AD). It speaks of an unsettled bird, lost from its flock, fluttering anxiously in search of a home. Having chanced upon a solitary pine tree growing apart, it folds its wings and is at rest. This movement from flighty impermanence towards solid, albeit solitary rest, is alluded to in the rapid, hocket-like passages of the first section, which give way to the weightier lines of the second half.

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TEXT – T’ao Ch’ien (365–427) Unsettled, a bird lost from the flock, Keeps flying by itself in the dusk.

Back and forth, it has no resting place, Night after night, more anguished its cries.

Its shrill sound yearns for the pure and distant, Coming from afar, how anxiously it flutters!

It chances to find a pine tree growing all apart; Folding its wings it has come home at last.

In the gusty wind there is no dense growth; This canopy alone does not decay.

Having found a perch to roost on, In a thousand years it will not depart.

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The Evening Watch Gustav Holst (1874–1934) TEXT: Henry Vaughan (1621–1695)

BODY Farewell! I go to sleep; but when The day-star springs, I’ll wake again.

SOUL Go, sleep in peace; and when thou liest Unnumber’d in thy dust, when all this frame Is but one dram, and what thou now descriest In sev’ral parts shall want a name, Then may his peace be with thee, and each dust Writ in his book, who ne’er betray’d man’s trust!

BODY Amen! but hark, ere we two stray How many hours dost think ’till day?

SOUL Ah go; th’art weak, and sleepy. Heav’n Is a plain watch, and without figures winds All ages up; who drew this circle, even He fills it; days and hours are blinds.

Yet this take with thee. The last gasp of time Is thy first breath, and man’s eternal prime.

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Longwave Amanda Feery World Premiere – commissioned in 2020 by Cork International Choral Festival and Chamber Choir Ireland with funds from the Arts Council / an Chomhairle Ealaíon

Amanda Feery is a composer working with acoustic, electronic, and improvised music, having written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, installation, and multimedia. Past collaborators include Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Mise-en, Bearthoven, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Crash Ensemble, RTÉ ConTempo Quartet, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Dublin Guitar Quartet, Paul Roe, Michelle O’Rourke, and Lina Andonovska.

Her work has featured at New Music Dublin, First Fortnight Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival, among others, and she has been composer-in-residence at Bang on a Can Summer Festival, SOUNDscape and Greywood Arts. Her 2019 residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais focused on recording piano improvisations on public pianos in Paris.

Recent projects include works for National Sawdust’s Hildegard Commission, Spilt Milk Festival, Music Network’s ‘Butterfly Sessions’, and Tadhg O’Sullivan’s film To the Moon.

Upcoming projects include works for Kaleidoscope Night, and the premiere of A Thing I Cannot Name, an opera commissioned by Irish National Opera with libretto by writer, Megan Nolan. Future projects include 5-60 second micro pieces for Fiachra Garvey and Sebastian Adams and an opera for flute for Lina Andonovska.

NOTE FROM THE COMPOSER

Listeners of the radio Shipping Forecast have said that it casts a calming presence over the airwaves, particularly the late-night shipping forecast. I have long been interested in the rhythm and cadence of the forecast itself, but also the public’s positive reaction to it, even though it communicates specialist maritime information. I have been drawn to the music of the phrases underlying the geographical place names and numerical coordinates; phrases such as ‘fair’, ‘poor, becoming moderate’, ‘occasionally good’, ‘veering off course’. Taken out of their nautical context, they possess their own poetic rhetoric. For this piece, I re-approached the text of the radio Shipping Forecast to explore themes of loneliness and isolation. Using a text that originated from analogue — 13 —

radio, a once crucial and communal medium, also opens up the opportunity to meditate on new media of the present, particularly social media, and the power it has to simultaneously foster community and exacerbate loneliness. Ultimately my objective for the piece was to write a lullaby for adulthood, using the transformed shipping forecast text to explore memory, grief, joy, and loneliness, amongst hazy recollections of old media formats and half-remembered melodies.

Dance Clarion Air Michael Tippett TEXT: Christopher Fry (1907–2005) Copyright

There is Sweet Music Edward Elgar TEXT: Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

Here are cool mosses deep, And thro’ the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

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The Windhover Michael Tippett TEXT: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

To Christ our Lord I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

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People Artistic Director Paul Hillier Guest Director Andrew Synnott Patron Michael D Higgins President of Ireland

Sopranos Abbi Temple Felicity Hayward Charlotte Trepess Méav Ní Mhaolchatha*

Chief Executive Majella Hollywood

Altos Christina Whyte Leanne Fitzgerald Stephen Wallace Mark Chambers*

Board of Directors Olga Barry Bea Kelleher Susan Lannigan Alastair Rankin Brian Walsh (Chair) Richard Twomey

Tenors Alan Leech Stuart Kinsella Shane Barriscale Christopher Bowen* Basses Jeffrey Ledwidge Paul McGough Eoghan Desmond William Gaunt *Deputy

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Concerts’ Manager David Darcy

Andrew Synnott Guest Director Andrew Synnott is a composer, arranger and conductor based in Dublin. He is the chorus master and artist in residence at Wexford Festival Opera. He has conducted operas for Irish National Opera, Wexford Festival Opera, Opera Theatre Company and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. His arrangements of La bohème, Susanna’s Secret and The Magic Flute have toured extensively in Ireland and the UK. He has conducted and been musical director for opera productions at the Buxton Opera Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in Australia, Portugal and France. Andrew has conducted and arranged several musicals, notibly the works of Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, Company, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along). He is a former artistic director and conductor of Crash Ensemble, a group he co-founded in 1997. He has conducted many orchestras and choirs, including Chamber Choir Ireland, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. In January 2015 he conducted the premiere of his first opera, Breakdown, in the NCH in Dublin. His second opera, Dubliners, was premiered at Wexford Festival Opera in 2017 and was nominated for an Irish Times Theatre Award in the Best Opera category. His opera, La cucina, became the first opera by a living Irish composer to be premiered on the main stage at Wexford Festival Opera 2019. His latest opera, What Happened To Lucrece, was filmed and broadcast digitally as part of last year’s Wexford Opera Festival.

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Chamber Choir Ireland ‘It was at once a sheerly beautiful immersion in choral sonority’ IRISH TIMES, MARCH 2019 Beethoven, featuring the Crash Ensemble and Stephen Richardson on the Orchid Classics label. The most recent release garnering a 5-star review in the Irish Times was Letters which included the CCI commission Triptych by David Fennessy and A Letter of Rights by Tarik O’Regan & Alice Goodman on the Naxos label (November 2020).

Garnering a strong reputation for its unique approach to creative commissioning, recording and programming, Chamber Choir Ireland is the country’s flagship choral ensemble and national chamber choir under the Artistic Direction of the multiaward-winning conductor, Paul Hillier.

The Choir’s programmes span from early renaissance to the present day, incorporating established choral classics with cutting edge commissions, and a style of performance that incorporates versatility, dynamism and often vocal pyrotechnics.

Chamber Choir Ireland has a strong Learning and Participation programme, including in Composers in the Classroom, Choral Sketches, Sing! at Axis:Ballymun and a lecture series on the history of choral music in Ireland.

Chamber Choir Ireland performances have been described as having a tone which is ‘liquid in its power and purity’ with a ‘strong vocal flexibility of style’ (Belfast Telegraph). The Choir has a strong commitment to touring in Ireland and continues to develop its touring network in order to present high quality choral concerts to audiences around the country. International touring has included the USA, UK, Belgium, Russia, Germany and South America.

Chamber Choir Ireland receives principal funding & support from the Arts Council/ an Chomhairle Ealaíon, is a resident ensemble at the National Concert Hall of Ireland, Associate Artists to Dublin City University, and a member of TENSO – the network of professional chamber choirs in Europe.

The choir has previously recorded for the Harmonia Mundi, RTE Lyric FM labels including the world premiere recording of works by Gerald Barry, Barry meets — 18 —

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Chamber Choir Ireland National Concert Hall Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2 telephone +353 (0) 1 554 5210 email admin@chamberchoirireland.com www.chamberchoirireland.com — 20 —