Corcoran
20 January 2012 – 1:21pm
Submitted by root_admin
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Composer(s):
Corcoran
Works:
Mad Sweeney; Music for the Book of Kells; Wind Quintet; Sweeney’s Vision
Performer:
Frank Corcoran (speaker); Das Neue Werk NDR Ensemble, Percussion Modern/Dieter Cichewiecz, Stuttgart Wind Quintet/Willy Freivogel
Label:
Black Box
Catalogue Number:
BBM 1026
Performance:
starstarstarstarstar
Sound:
starstarstarstarnostar
There’s an enticing new-music culture in Ireland, and though much of its product is rarely heard in English concert venues (or Welsh or Scottish, one suspects), these releases from Black Box will play their part in fostering a closer awareness of the subject. While Frank Corcoran and John Buckley represent the middle generation, being born in 1944 and 1951 respectively, Gráinne Mulvey and Deirdre Gribbin are of younger stock, of 1966 and 67 vintage, so the range is evenly balanced both in age and gender. Through the medium of chamber music each composer focuses on an aspect of poetic understanding that avoids, with Corcoran’s exception, the issue of a distinctly national idiom. Corcoran writes music for the Book of Kells, and for Heaney’s translation of the Middle Irish text Mad Sweeney. His ‘macro counterpoint’ and bright and stormy sounds evoking the truth of the Irish dream landscape sound less well in performance than in his description.
Posted under: Humble Hamburg Musings