NATIONAL CONCERT HALL
2024 — 2025 SEASON
INTERNATIONAL ORCHESTRAS AND RECITALS
SATURDAY 30
NOVEMBER 2024
7.30PM
PARAORCHESTRA
Charles Hazlewood conductor
Victoria Oruwari soprano
The pioneering ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians, with guest soprano Victoria Oruwari, led by Charles Hazlewood perform Górecki’s cathartic and hauntingly beautiful work Symphony of Sorrowful Songs , preceded by Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, a melancholic, iridescent and urgent piece realised for full string orchestra by Mahler.
Pre-concert talk 6.15pm-7pm
Tickets from €15
Discounts and Packages Available nch.ie
Fáilte Welcome
Welcome to tonight’s recital by one of America’s most exciting String Quartets, Brooklyn Rider, as they perform as part of our International Concert Season 2024/2025. It is our great pleasure to welcome them to Dublin and to the NCH to perform for us this evening.
Described as having a gripping performance style and unquenchable appetite for musical adventure, Brooklyn Rider has over their fifteen year history carved out a unique space in the world of string quartets. Tonight they present and perform a concert programme that takes a deep dive into the four elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water giving voice to the beauties and mysteries of our world but also the threat of its destruction due to climate change. Indeed the natural world is a recurring theme across the Season’s programme, with many composers and musicians choosing to use music to shine a light on the topic of our climate crisis. We are delighted to hear repertoire that includes a range of new works and Irish premieres by Jacobson, Tucker and Pinto-Correia as well as chamber works by Dutilleux, Shostakovich and Golijov. I have no doubt but that it will be both inspirational and memorable.
The Season continues with more great music by visiting artists and ensembles from around the world as well as weekly concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra. In addition, our Chamber Music Series in the Kevin Barry Recital Room sees regular afternoon concerts by a range of quartets in association with the National String Quartet Foundation as well as the Dublin Song Series with recitals by leading Irish and International singers.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank The Department of Tourism, Arts, Gaeltacht, Heritage Sport and Media for their ongoing support and to our corporate supporters, Friends, Season Friends and Patrons for their loyalty and support which is very much appreciated.
Enjoy tonight’s performance and we look forward to welcoming back throughout the season to hear more great music at the NCH.
Robert Read
Maura McGrath CEO Chairperson
CELEBRATING THE VOICE
A Professional Development Programme for
Singers
Designed and led by Artist-in-Residence
Tara Erraught
MONDAY 10 FEBRUARY – FRIDAY 14 FEBRUARY 2025
12 singers, seven Irish and international industry experts
12 events including a song recital, opera gala with the National Symphony Orchestra, public masterclasses, vocal coaching, talks, conversations and panel discussions.
Full programme now available. See nch.ie
Programme
Colin Jacobsen A Short While to be Here… (Irish premiere)
Arrangement of American Folk Songs as collected by Ruth Crawford Seeger
Akshaya Tucker Hollow Flame for String Quartet (Irish premiere)
Andreia Pinto-Correia Aere senza stelle for String Quartet (Irish premiere)
Dutilleux
Shostakovich
Golijov
Ainsi la nuit for String Quartet
INTERVAL
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor Op. 110
Tenebrae for String Quartet
PLEASE NOTE: The NCH does not permit photography or videography during the performance (without prior permission). We kindly ask you to refrain from using any recording equipment for the duration of tonight’s performance.
NCH Board Members
Maura McGrath Chair | James Cavanagh | Cliona Doris
Rebecca Gageby | Hilary Hough | Peter McKenna
Niamh Murray | Michelle O’Sullivan | Don Thornhill
Patron
Michael D. Higgins President of Ireland
Brooklyn Rider
Johnny Gandelsman violin | Colin Jacobsen violin | Nicholas Cords viola
Michael Nicolas cello
The name Brooklyn Rider is inspired by the artist group The Blue Rider, which published an eclectic almanac of artwork, essays and music that served as an artistic testament to their time while offering a vision for the future and an open embrace of diverse artistic traditions, media, and aesthetics.
Hailed as “the future of chamber music” (Strings), the String Quartet Brooklyn Rider presents eclectic repertoire and gripping performances that continue to draw rave reviews from classical, world, and rock critics alike. NPR credits Brooklyn Rider with “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21stcentury ensemble,” which is reflected in the quartet’s programmes: with The 4 Elements, Brooklyn Rider brings a theme to their concerts that is topical and timely: global warming and the destruction of our planet, which also serves as a wake-up call.
With an almost prophetic sense for the zeitgeist, Brooklyn Rider presented the project Healing Modes in 2020, which takes a holistic view on Beethoven’s Op. 132 combined with five commissioned works by Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Matana Roberts and the two Pulitzer Prize winners Caroline Shaw and Du Yun. They explore the theme of healing from a variety of historical and cultural perspectives. In March 2020, the New Yorker praised the concept of the recording as convincing and the playing of the four as persuasive.
In 2019, two albums were released featuring instrumentalists who are at the forefront of their respective genre: jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman (Sun On Sand) and Irish fiddle master Martin Hayes (The Butterfly).
In the fall of 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Dreamers on Sony Music Masterworks with celebrated Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera. The recording includes gems of the Ibero-American songbook as well as pieces written to texts by Octavio Paz, Rubén Darío, and Federico García Lorca — all reimagined by arrangers including Jaques Morelenbaum, Gonzalo Grau, Diego Schissi, Guillermo Klein, and Brooklyn Rider’s own Colin Jacobsen.
In 2017/ 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Spontaneous Symbols. The album features new quartet music by Tyondai Braxton, Evan Ziporyn, Paula Matthusen, Kyle Sanna, and Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen. Works from that recording were also featured in the live performance of Some of a Thousand Words, the ensemble’s recent collaboration with choreographer Brian Brooks and former New York City Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan. An intimate series of duets and solos in which the quartet’s live onstage music is a dynamic and central creative component, Some of a Thousand Words was featured at the 2016 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, before two U.S. tours, including a week-long run at New York City’s Joyce Theater.
In 2016, Brooklyn Rider released an album entitled so many things on Naïve Records with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, comprising music by Colin Jacobsen, Caroline Shaw, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Björk, Sting, Kate Bush and Elvis Costello, among others. The group toured material from the album and more with von Otter in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at Carnegie Hall and the Opernhaus Zürich.
Additionally, Brooklyn Rider performed Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 7, furthering a relationship with the iconic American composer, which began with 2011’s muchpraised Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass and will continue with the upcoming album release of Glass’s recent quartets on the composer’s Orange Mountain Music label.
In 2015, the group celebrated its tenth anniversary with the groundbreaking multidisciplinary project Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which it recorded and toured 15 specially commissioned works, each inspired by a different artistic muse. The second edition of the project with four new works by Clarice Assad, Gabriel Kahane, Giovanni Sollima and Tyshawn Sorey was performed in the ‘23/’24 season at the Kölner Philharmonie and several other venues.
Brooklyn Rider toured Australia in February 2024 with concerts at the Melbourne Recital Center, the Perth Festival, Ukaria in Adelaide and the Sydney Opera House. The Sydney Morning Herald subsequently ran the headline, “This may be the coolest String Quartet in the world”.
Throughout the 2024/25 season, the quartet performs in Europe at venues the Tonhalle Zurich, the Pierre Boulez Saal Berlin, the Konserthuset Stockholm and the Teatro Auditorium Manzoni in Bologna, Italy.
NATIONAL CONCERT HALL
2024 — 2025 SEASON
INTERNATIONAL ORCHESTRAS AND RECITALS
SATURDAY 1
FEB 2025
7:30PM
NOBUYUKI TSUJII piano
Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 21, Waldstein
Liszt En rêve
Liszt Mephisto Waltz No. 1
Chopin Nocturne No. 7
Chopin Nocturne No. 8
Chopin Piano Sonata No. 3
The young Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, who has been blind from birth, is ‘one of the most unique classical pianists performing today’ (Classical Voice).
Pre-concert talk 6.15pm-7pm
Tickets from €15
Discounts and Packages Available nch.ie
Programme Notes
The 4 Elements
The idea of four core elements - Earth, Air, Fire, Water - as the physical world’s foundation was a shared belief across numerous ancient cultures, including those in Greece, Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, India, and beyond. In myriad combinations, these four elements were thought to be capable of both infinite creation and powerful destruction. In parallel, the unique musical ecosystem of the string quartet is a delicate balance of four unique human elements, collectively capable of voicing the profound beauties of our world as well as its potential for violent change.
In their latest project, Brooklyn Rider convenes a musical discussion based on the future of our planet. In part a celebration of Earth’s wondrous mysteries, this project is more importantly designed to raise attention to the powerful forces of climate change which, taken together, represent the single greatest challenge of our time. Brooklyn Rider’s intrepid programme concept, The 4 Elements, gathers music either broadly representative of, or directly inspired by, the classical elements of earth, air, fire, water. Four works are drawn from the last one hundred years, a century marked by unprecedented planetary change, while four are newly commissioned scores penned by composers with unique global perspectives that more urgently reflect current realities and serve as a musical call to action.
Colin Jacobsen
A Short While To Be Here (2023)
(based on American Folk Songs as collected by Ruth Crawford Seeger)
I. Whoa, Mule!
II. Hommage a Ruth
III. Peep Squirrel
IV. The Old Cow Died
V. Little Birdie
We have a “short while to be here, and a long time to be gone,” as the lyrics go on the American folk song Little Birdie. Astronaut Loren Acton described his experience looking down at our home planet Earth from above: “Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty - but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That’s where life is; that’s where all the good stuff is.”
In writing this piece, I was very much inspired by the example of Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of America’s most forward looking composers of the early part of the 20th century. Then her life took a turn in Depression-era America as she and her husband Charles Seeger began a deep investigation of American folk music alongside the Lomax brothers during the FDR years. She treated folk music with the respect and attention that Béla Bartók had exhibited in a somewhat parallel fashion in Europe, and as an educator became deeply committed to teaching folk songs to children. She published several collections of American folk songs for children, including the Animal Folk Songs for Children. She also raised four children of her own during that challenging time, several of whom became icons of the folk-revival movement in the generation to come (step-son Pete Seeger, and her own children Peggy and Mike Seeger). For around 20 years, her personal compositional voice was silent, but in 1952, she wrote one last modernist composition, a wind quintet before falling ill and eventually succumbing to cancer. I like to imagine what would have happened if she had lived longer and had attempted to further integrate her life’s work- her love of folk music alongside her formalist/composerly voice. So this piece, representing Earth in our Four Elements project, is very much an homage to Ruth (nicknamed “Dio” by her children) as well as joyous celebration of our home planet. This of course includes all animals and children past and present who’ve been here or will be here a short while and then gone for a long time.
Akshaya Avril Tucker
Hollow Flame (2022)
(Co-commissioned by Bagaduce Music and Carnegie Hall)
‘Here in California, fire is at our doorstep. Although I am a relatively new arrival to the state, it’s still frightening. Fire has already had a devastating impact especially on Northern California communities (and completely wiped out the town of Paradise in 2018). Across California, we have been experiencing extreme drought for years. All these conditions, from drought to fire to mudslides, are predicted to worsen as our planet warms.
My string quartet, Hollow Flame, is like a journal entry of moments recorded over many months in which I try to grapple with what is happening in the climate crisis: the loss of so much, from human lives to old-growth forests, let alone human health and the well-being of our ecosystems. Hollow Flame is an attempt to witness my own numbness, my own inability to even form words when I try to talk about this. The sections of the piece (as listed within the score) are as follows: Chant-like, through a cathedral of trees; Suddenly bright; Frenzied; The Earth; and Echoes of the empty forest.
My research for this project began in 2020, and led me through a number of writings on the climate crisis. My participation in Composing Earth, a programme from the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, has been essential throughout this process. Something like a book club or a support group, this program has opened a space for all the difficult feelings the climate crisis opens in us: grief, fear, anxiety, empathy, anger. Researching this topic, alone at first, felt extremely isolating, even impossible. But in a group, however small, we could share our experiences, and know that -- no, we aren’t crazy -- for feeling maddeningly frustrated by the apathy of millions, by our own numbness. I want to commend Brooklyn Rider for their courage in choosing this topic, which is so difficult to write and speak about; and I am grateful to Bagaduce Music and Carnegie Hall for cocommissioning this piece’.
By Akshaya Avril Tucker
Andreia Pinto Correia
Aere senza stelle (2022)
‘The inspiration for Aere senza stelle (Air Without Stars) was the tempestades de poeira—or dust storms—that travel from the Sahara Desert to the Iberia Peninsula, a phenomenon experienced during my youth in Portugal. From the descriptions of “blood rains” as bad omens epics by Homer, Hesiod, and Plutarch, to scientific observations by Darwin and Ehrenberg in the nineteenth century, up until today, the reporting of desert dust storms has evolved from descriptive narratives to encompassing an entire field of environmental research.
Re-reading Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, I recognized a profound poetic connection to climate change, and so I mirrored the structure of Canto III, 22-30 dividing the work into three sections. In the final measures, the string quartet creates a sonic cloud, as though carrying an infinite stream of particles from the desert to other parts of the world.
I Lacrimoso, quasi recitativo – the starless air: lyrical and static.
II Agitato, strepitoso – a tumult of voices: dense, angular and dissonant.
III Misterioso, senza misura. Inquieto – time suspended.
Commissioned by the 2022 Vail Dance Festival, Damien Woetzel - Artistic Director
- Aere senza stelle is dedicated in admiration to António Guterres, for his life dedication to climate change issues, and to Catarina Vaz Pinto. A special thank you to Brooklyn Rider’.
By Correia
Henri Dutilleux
Ainsi la nuit (1973-76)
I. Nocturne - Parenthèse I
II. Miroir d’espace - Parenthése II
III. Litanies - Parenthése III
IV. Litanies II - Parenthése IV
V. Constellations
VI. Nocturne II
VII. Temps Suspendu
Completed in 1976, Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit (Thus the Night) is one of the greatest works for string quartet written in the second half of the 20th century. While non-programmatic, it is rather a surreal musical meditation on the idea of night in all of its guises; calm, transcendence, premonition, ecstasy, dreams, nightmares. This singular work achieves a couple of notable feats. One is a near miraculous balance between complexity and transparency. Even when the music is at its most dense, the myriad events feel suspended in air, an element which practically serves as the fifth member of the ensemble. It also achieves another delicate balance; while incredibly virtuosic (both compositionally and instrumentally), this work always manages to invite the listener beyond its material facade into the beguiling and surreal atmospheres that these techniques serve to create.
Dutilleux had a long-standing fascination with Marcel Proust’s concept of memory as expressed in Remembrance of Things Past. Ainsi la nuit utilizes a unique formal structure to create a sense of interconnectedness and a fluid unfolding of events. The seven principal movements are performed continuously, with transitional “parenthesis” often serving as connective tissue. Reluctant to state full themes at their outset, Dutilleux utilizes incomplete fragments of melodies, harmonic/pitch relationships, and the technique of continual development to create a sense of organic connection. In fact, it would not be unusual to experience a sense of déjà vu as the music unfurls. The resulting fantastical music depicts a complex web of memory and consciousness; something central to our human experience, but highly illusive to express.
By Nicholas Cords
INTERVAL
Dmitri Shostakovich
String Quartet No. 8 in c minor, Op 110 (1960)
Dmitri Shostakovich’s explosive Eighth String Quartet was written in just three days in 1960 while visiting Dresden to write music for the film Five Days and Five Nights about the allied firebombing of that city in World War II. Dedicated to “the victims of fascism and war,” the extramusical meaning of the work has long been debated. Is it an autobiographical statement about the composer’s struggles against the Stalinist regime, a reference to the Holocaust, or a rebuke to totalitarianism? While we will never ultimately know, this beloved work has nevertheless secured a place as one of the most important and searingly powerful works of the 20th century.
The basic building block of the five movement composition is based on the spelling of the composer’s name DSCH (D-E-flat-C-B), heard in the fugal opening of the first movement. The second movement reveals an iconic Jewish theme also heard in the composer’s famous Second Piano Trio. The composer describes his feelings on the qualitative elements of Jewish music in Testimony “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me… it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality… is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.” Following the third movement’s macabre waltz, the fourth movement unfolds in a series of quotations. Opening with a series of ominous knockings, an inverted DSCH statement is juxtaposed, revealing a fragment of the Dies Irae from the Catholic Requiem Mass. Following this, the lower three instruments play a Russian funeral anthem (…tormented by the weight of bondage, you glorify death with honor…), followed by the two violins sounding the Russian revolutionary song “Languishing in prison.” Later in the movement, a soaringly transcendent cello melody from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk serves as an emotional crest, followed by an elegiac and contrapuntal reprise of the DSCH theme in the concluding movement.
By Nicholas Cords
Osvaldo Golijov Tenebrae (2003)
I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar”, the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.
By Osvaldo Golijov
WHERE CONCERTS MAKE CONNECTIONS
THANK YOU TO OUR CORPORATE AND INDIVIDUAL SUPPORTERS
We would like to acknowledge with appreciation and gratitude the generous support of our Corporate Partners, Corporate Members, Patrons, John Field Society Members and Friends.
PROGRAMME PARTNERS
TRUST & FOUNDATION PARTNERS
CORPORATE MEMBERS
OVATION
ENCORE
APPLAUSE
PATRONS & JOHN FIELD SOCIETY MEMBERS
Frank & Ivy Bannister • William Barton • James Billet • Michael Bourke • Sharon Burke Brid Cannon & Juan Pablo Cortes Ocampo • Dr Tom Carey • Bernadette Coggins
Matt Farrelly • Louis & Mary Fitzgerald • Dr Crona Gallagher & Jim Clery • Brian Kingham • Mary Mac Aodha Brian Mc Elroy • Sinead Nic Oireachtaigh • Prof Deirdre O Grady • Dr Rachel Patton John Pollard Foundation • Beverly Sperry • Kieran Tobin • Dr Peter & Elva Wyatt
FRIENDS, SEASON FRIENDS AND SUPPORTING FRIENDS
Please get in touch with a member of the Partnerships & Philanthropy Team to learn more and find out how you can support your National Concert Hall today:
Aisling Kennedy Corporate Development Executive aisling.kennedy@nch.ie
Emmet McSwiney Individual Giving Executive emmet.mcswiney@nch.ie
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