Sundays at Noon: Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble

From the sculpture hall of the Hugh Lane Gallery :

Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble

Programme

3 movements on the work of William Scott (2017)
Greg Caffrey (1963)

Beneath the Dark Blue Waves (2019)*Jane O’Leary (1946)

The Light Within (2007)
John Luther Adams (1953)

In the Light of Air – Serenity (2014) Anna Thorvaldsdottir (1977)

Largely inspired by the visual arts, this programme highlights music which encourages us to consider and imagine various visual elements. William Scott, whose works hang in the Ulster Museum, is the focus for our Featured Composer Greg Caffrey.

There is an Irish-American connection, Jane O’Leary, with her atmospheric vision of Gwen O’Dowd’s abstract sea paintings and John Luther Adams The Light Within. He describes the inspiration behind the piece “On a crisp autumn day sitting inside Meeting - Turrell’s skyspace at PS1 in Queens, New York - I experienced my own epiphany of light. From mid-afternoon through sunset into night, I was transfixed by the magical interplay of light and colour, above and within. Over the hours the sky descended through every nameless shade of blue, to heaviest black. The light within the space rose from softest white, through ineffable yellow to deepest orange. Just after sunset there came a moment when outside and inside met in perfect equipoise. The midnight blue of the sky and the burnished peach of the room came together, fusing into one vibrant yet intangible plane...light becoming colour, becoming substance.”

The spacious and thoughtful atmosphere of this work carries through to the end of the concert with a work by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, whose “musical material is constructed with a focus on subtle nuances and poetic textures...”. Her score is imbued with beauty and fragility and performance directions such as “Soloistic with calm & ease and subtle sense of brokenness” complete our transcendence into ambient artistry.

* Commissioned by HRSE with funds from the ACNI Small Grants Programme