The Guardian - 30.08.2019

• The Guardian
  Friday 30 August 2019 15

E

ight years ago, Nonesuch released a

disc of Donnacha Dennehy ’s music that

included the remarkable Grá agus Bás ,

from 2007, in which the highly decorated,

unaccompanied vocal lines of the Gaelic

seán nos song tradition were fused with

Dennehy’s own musical language, rooted in minimalism

and spectralism. That integration of two utterly distinct

musical worlds seemed to unlock a new directness in the

composer’s work, as if the Irish element was the missing

piece in his musical armoury. And though there are not

many traces of it in the two operas Dennehy went on

to compose with Enda Walsh, The Last Hotel and The

Second Violinist , it’s to the fore again in The Hunger.

This is the 2018 concert version of what Dennehy

calls a “docu-cantata”. It deals with the catastrophic

Irish famine of 1845-52, as seen through the eyes of the

American philanthropist and social observer Asenath

Nicholson , whose Annals of the Famine in Ireland was

a contemporary account of its horrors. The longer, fully

staged version of The Hunger includes video interviews

about the famine with economists and historians, but

for the concert hall, Dennehy concentrates on its musical

core, in which he creates a dialogue between Nicholson

( soprano Katherine Manley ) and a dying Irish man

( seán n os singer Iarla Ó Lionáird ).

Eff ectively it’s a song cycle in fi ve extended parts,

in which the musical worlds of the two protagonists

gradually merge, while the John Adams-like ensemble

writing pulses away beneath them. But it’s not as

convincing as Grá agus Bás – in the early parts , some of

the soprano lines seem rather commonplace, and there’s

a sense of detachment from the subject matter, which

keeps the listener a bit too much at arm’s length, too.

Also out this week

Sun Rings is one of the many pieces that Terry Riley has

composed for the Kronos Quartet. It dates back to 2002,

when Riley was commissioned by N asa to compose

a work based on sounds recorded by the Voyager

spacecrafts. Riley was writing it at the time of 9/11,

and what was planned as a 20-minute work eventually

became four times as long, with 10 movements and a

chorus in two of them, alongside the quartet and the

pre-recorded “spacescapes”. The sequence ends with a

movement quoting Alice Walker’s mantra, “One Earth,

One People, One Love”. It’s musically very diverse – Hero

Danger has echoes of Indian music, Beebopterismo and

Planet Elf Sindoori are predominantly melodic, The

Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour , rhythmically

driven. It’s eccentric and charming, typical Riley.

Andrew Clements

Artist Manley/Ó Lionáird/Pierson

Album Donnacha Dennehy: The Hunger

Label Nonesuch

★★★★☆

Compelling cantata

about the Irish famine

Common

Let Love

★★★☆☆

Daniel Caesar,

Jill Scott, BJ the

Chicago Kid and

more drop in on

the veteran

activist/rapper’s

sumptuously

produced 12th

album, full of his

wisdom. AH

Natasha

Bedingfi eld

Roll With Me

★★☆☆☆

Flitting between

bubblegum pop ,

white regg ae and

ponderous state-

of-the-world

addresses,

Bedingfi eld’s

scattershot

fourth album

overworks itself

creatively. MC

Black Belt

Eagle Scout

At the Party

With My

Brown Friends

★★★★☆

Katherine Paul’s

second album is

political and

richly melodic –

it sounds like

the golden age

of US alt-rock,

a Mazzy Star for

troubled times.

MH

Pharmakon

Devour

★★★☆☆

New York

noise artist’s

raw, engulfi ng

album about

self-cannibalism

(a metaphor

for humanity’s

self-destruction).

Not for the faint-

hearted. AC

In brief

Classical

album of

the week

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