★
The sleeve notes for this collection of Donnacha Dennehy’s orchestral and choral works, all composed when he was in his 30s, single him out as “the most striking young voice in Irish music”. It’s hard to disagree. Alongside the powerful Nonesuch disc of vocal works released four years ago, they show how confidently Dennehy has imposed his musical personality on a diverse range of influences that includes the hard-edged euro-minimalism of Louis Andriessen, the microtonal harmonies of Gérard Grisey and the spectralists, and sometimes the anarchic wildness of his fellow countryman Gerald Barry. The two earliest scores here are sharply contrasted: The Vandal, from 2000, barely keeps its violent tendencies in check, while O (2003) is much more ambiguous – part celebration, part fond memorial. Both, though, seem more straightforward than the later works. Hive includes choral settings of two 19th-century descriptions of London, by Lord Byron and Thomas Beame, in a haze of shifting quarter tones, while in the ballet score Crane (the title is industrial rather than avian), completed four years later in 2009, mechanical, driving rhythms are offset with textures of shimmering lightness. The sheer range of Dennehy’s music is hugely impressive.
