Frank Corcoran

Pour a glass and quaff at this radio-interview recently ….

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/arena/programmes/2015/1207/751906-arena-monday-7-december-2015/

Live Reviews: Corcoran, Ligeti, Leyendecker, and Hamel

Corcoran, Ligeti, Leyendecker, and Hamel –Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, 14 October 2001

The ‘Sundays at noon’ concert series at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art provide a rare and very welcome opportunity to hear contemporary…

CONOR KOSTICK
Corcoran, Ligeti, Leyendecker, and Hamel – Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, 14 October 2001
The ‘Sundays at noon’ concert series at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art provide a rare and very welcome opportunity tohear contemporary classical music. A good sized audience took advantage of the free entry to hear a programme of ‘six threads’ woventogether by Frank Corcoran on October 14th.The concert featured works by Corcoran, Ligeti, Leyendecker, and Hamel, the connecting link being that of the Staatliche Hochschule f
ü
r Musik und darstellende Kunst, Hamberg, where Corcoran has been professor of composition and theory since 1983. The event was a presentation by the Goethe Institut, in co-operation with the Association of Irish Composers.

Music for the Book Of Kells
is a 1990 composition by Frank Corcoran. This performance by the
RIAM

Percussion Ensemble was its Dublin Premiere. The work is inspired by a notion of seventh-century Ireland as combining the heroic age of Celtic warriors with the rise of great Christian scholarship. The piece is surprisingly visual and it is entirely appropriate for composer to describe it as a ‘sound landscape’. The striking of bells evokes the round tower, the ominous rumble of the drums, the march of armies. Overall the feel of this work was dark and sinister with moments of real power.The third concert piece was

Hebräische Balladen

by Ulrich Leyendecker (1993), a Professor in Hamberg alongside Frank Corcoran. Perhaps it was my lack of German, but this work was a distinctly less engaging part of the concert. Leyendecker’s piece is for soprano and piano, and while the technical ability of Rachel Talbot andDavid Adams was flawless in coping with its complex rhythmic and melodic changes, it may have also suffered from the acoustics at the Hugh Lane which seem to distort sound to the detriment of the lower tones.

Frank Corcoran’s second contribution to the concert was a Dublin premiere of his
Third Wind Quintet
,
Sweeney’s Wind-Cries
,
played by the Daedalus Wind Quintet. The story of the semi-mad seventh centuryking, transformed into a bird, condemned to flying about Ireland with unrecognised meaning to his apparently nonsensical twitterings has long been an interesting image for Irish artists and Sweeney has featured surprisingly often in literature, theatre and music.

The
Quintet
reflects its subject matter by being a dualistic piece, hovering between recognisable form and inchoateness. It is ‘one long argument’ as the composer put it in his pre-concert talk, between discipline and freedom, between a tiny figure appearing in the opening arpeggios and a swirling world of suffering about them. Sometimes on first being exposed to a complex piece of music you half catch the feel of it – enough to want to hear it again and absorb it. So it was with this work, not as immediately engaging as, say,
Music for the Book of Kells
, but if you had a version on
CD
you would want to play it repeatedly until you had grasped the argument.

The concert concluded with Frank Corcoran’s
Trauerfelder-Goirt An Bhróin
(1995) with
RIAM Percussion Ensemble.
This piece arose from commission by the Ministry of Culture to mark the 50th year of the Jewish community’s liberation from Auschwitz. Now in my experience, over 90 per cent of cultural references to the Holocaust come to grief. It is often an image used to evoke horror, without any depth to the actuality of the horror and as such over the years has become debased. The difficulty of this composition is that not only is the composer not Jewish, nor German, but he was asked to ‘celebrate’ the liberation. Wisely Corcoran refrained from obliging with a happy ending. The music is funereal, sombre and at the same time it does not shirk from its subject matter. Very visual images are created by the useof chains, whistles and tam-tams.

Frank Corcoran awarded prestigious IFCM choral composition prize

Frank Corcoran

A choral piece by Irish composer Frank Corcoran has been selected out of 637 entries as the winner of the International Federation for Choral Music’s Second International Competition for Choral Composition.

Judged this year by an international board, the award is a prestigious one, with the winner being presented with both a monetary prize and a diploma from the International Federation for Choral Music.

The International Federation for Choral Music (IFCM) is the only not-for-profit global choral singing group in the world, and is dedicated to the promotion of choral singing as being open to all, and the availability of quality choral music to amateurs and professionals alike.

A Fulbright scholar and founding member of Aosdána, Frank Corcoran is well known internationally for his choral composition, and has won a number of awards, including last year’s Seán Ó Ríada Composition Competition at the Cork International Choral Competition with the piece Two Unholy Haikus. The winning work, Eight Haikus, will receive its world premiere by the esteemed choir The Phillipine Madrigal Singers later this year.

mdervan@irishtimes.com

Corcoran CD lanched

Hamburg-based Irish composer Frank Corcoran’s new RTÉ Lyric FM CD, Rhapsodic Celli, was officially

launched at a concert of his music at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday.

December 2. 2017 NDR – KULTUR

Frank Corcoran : a two – hour portrait of Elgar’s CELLO CONCERTO

plus; Frank Corcoran’s CELLO CONCERTO

( from the new RTE -LYRIC Frank Corcoran CD ” Rhapsodic Celli ” which includes this Concerto and

“Rhapsodic Celli ” for 8 Celli etc. etc. )

Re: Frank Corcoran’s compositional accomplishments :

I know this is from last year, but thinking back on his sublime Music for the Book of Kells and Trauerfelder/Goirt an Bhróin/Fields of Sorrow at the Hugh Lane Gallery last December, which reduced members of the audience (including this scribe) to tears, I really think his international recognition should be more widely known in Ireland. Yes, it’s ‘Art Music.’ Yes, it may take a few listens to adjust the ear. But the rewards are great. I’m rather proud he’s my third cousin! He will be 70 this year, so it’s no better time to discover him if you haven’t already.
Frank Corcoran awarded prestigious IFCM choral composition prize

Dear Frank,

Sunday July 9 we’ll broadcast your cello concert and more of your music in our program Sonoor at 18.00

hours.

Repeat July 17th at 17.00 hrs.

CONCERTZENDER HOLLAND RADIO

The usual watershed.
Where’ll I go from here , new big work or small ?
Writing and hearing and recording the 8 DUETTI IRLANDESI for Cello and Piano for the new CD, “Rhapsodic
Celli”, whetted the appetite , first of all, for Corcoran Lite pieces, for the minor art.
The new Piano
Trio is small in its proportions and only 3 instruments ( Piano, Cello plus tawny viola – a far cry from
my 1977 lonely act of courage with that First Piano Trio ( plus Violin, of course ) .
2018 in Blankenese, Hamburg , will be the premiere of 5 LIEDER with Corcoran texts. also an important trigger of future work.

Nov. 2 of this year in Dublin’s the ( exciting ) premiere of Piccolo Quartetto Filarmonico with Malachy Robinson’s double-bass and cello, viola, violin line-up. We are back to macrocounterpoint .

Small work makes big work. I am very excited at the 2019 New York NORTH SOUTH Premiere of a new Clarinet
Concerto. Shhh !

I think the pipelining of MY ALTO RHAPSODIES for Alto and ( yes ! ) Orchestra may yet set off the explosion. I know the premiere of the Cello Concerto and my re-discovery of “Rhapsodic Bowing” for 8 Celli did ( both adorn that new CD ) .

One thing leads to another. One formal sonic conquest triggers off another.
The new String Quartet is great,
each of its 3 movements like reinforced steel.
So keep the head in the great heat of July.
Keep the head.
Keep it cool.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Mar a Dúirt an Chrotach

Bhuaileas le Frank Corcoran roimh na Nollaig. Bhí sé anseo i Nua Eabhrac ag tabhairt léachta agus cuireadh in aithne mé leis ansin. Is ceoltóir é, tá cáil nach beag idirnáisiúnta air, cumadóir san aicme clasaiceach ar a tugtar Art Music sa Bhéarla. Tá bua na dteangacha aige chomh maith, níl a fhios agam cé mhead teanga atá aige. Is as Borrisokane, Co. Tiobraid Árann é ach bhog sé go dtí an Ghearmáin blianta ó shin agus anois tá lucht éisteachta aige ar fud an domhan.

B B C LISTINGS JUNE 5 1980
11.15
: Hesketh Piano Trio
Balfe Trio in A major Frank Corcoran Piano Trio (first UK broadcast) Moeran Trio BBC Northern Ireland
Contributors
Piano: Frank Corcoran