Frank Corcoran

irish composer

HOW FAR BACK DO I SCRAPE THE ( CRITICS’ ) BARREL ?

Concorde

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

This concert by Jane O’Leary’s new-music ensemble, Concorde, included the Irish premiere of Four Pieces(2006), by young Slovenian composer Nina Senk, which the ensemble will perform in Ljubljana next month.

Senk is only 25, but the riveting playing of Elaine Clark (violin), David James (cello) and Dermot Dunne (accordion) made it easy to hear why her music is already much travelled.

The rest of the programme drew on Concorde’s rich back-catalogue of Irish commissions. Two vocal works from 2006, Frank Corcoran’s The Light Gleams and Elaine Agnew’s In the Adriatic, were elegantly articulated by soprano Tine Verbeke.

Taking a fragment of text from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Corcoran’s piece places its three monosyllables in a setting of poised abstraction, as if examining its vowels and consonants from various angles under a powerful microscope.

Posted under: Humble Hamburg Musings

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