Donnacha Dennehy
Land of Winter
Alarm Will Sound/Alan Pierson
Nonesuch 7559789949 53:51 mins
Clip: Donnacha Dennehy - Land of Winter, II. January
The Larne-born musicologist Bob Gilmore (1961-2015) once observed that Donnacha Dennehy (b1970) writes ‘music that deals with big issues, but has such an appealingly odd way of addressing them.’ Land of Winter (2022) is typically oblique while being utterly direct – and wonderfully subtle, with a palette that combines Dennehy’s keen poetic awareness of his Irish roots with his fine, spectral ear for the physical properties of sound, and love of pulse-driven post-minimalism.
The land of the title is Ireland, seen through shivering, ancient Roman eyes: ‘Hibernia’, its cold seeming to penetrate every month of the year. Dennehy has professed a fascination with weather both literal and metaphorical, and here it’s the interplay of light and time that underpins his 12, through-composed movements, ‘from the shorter days of grey or piercing light in the winter to the much longer, warmer but mercurial light of summer.’
The result is a propulsive yet static, intensely melancholic yet knowingly playful cycle for large ensemble that starts with December and only nominally ends with November. Overlapping layers of sounds, colours and rhythms expand and contract – both vertically and horizontally, as sheets and spatters of modal-microtonal rain fall on surfaces born from aeons of shifting subterranean strata.
Alarm Will Sound are excellent under conductor Alan Pierson: from piccolo to contra bassoon via inventively muted brass, strings and bowed, sometimes thudding percussion. Through mist and shafts of sunlight, snippets of JS Bach’s yearning advent chorale Wie soll ich dich empfangen half-emerge, alongside the spectre of climate change. Steph Power
Video: Donnacha Dennehy - Land of Winter: XII. November