Alarm Will Sound

Princeton Sound Kitchen, Princeton University’s lab for new music by composition faculty and staff, launches its 2019-20 season with “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene.” (The New York Times) Composition faculty Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger is a music-theater work that gives a unique perspective on Ireland’s Great Famine. This concert version features the remarkable folk singer and Princeton University Global Scholar Iarla Ó Lionáird, soprano Katherine Manley, and Alarm Will Sound. The Irish folk music narrative is interwoven with personal, historical accounts, where the libretto principally draws from first-hand accounts by Asenath Nicholson, an American humanitarian so moved by the waves of immigrants arriving in New York that she travelled to Ireland to report from the cabins of starving families.