
Donnacha Dennehy is a composer whose music has featured in festivals and venues around the world.
The Hunger
with Iarla Ó Lionáird
New Works TBA
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.
“As close to being a rock band as a chamber orchestra can be” (The New York Times), Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member touring ensemble led by Artistic Director Alan Pierson that commissions, performs, and records innovative works by established and emerging composers, especially works that incorporate theatrical and multimedia elements by choreographers, visual artists, designers, and directors. Its wideranging artistic vision looks beyond genre—electronic vs. acoustic, high-modernist vs. pop-influenced, conventional classical concert vs. multimedia experience.
Donnacha Dennehy is a composer whose music has featured in festivals and venues around the world.
Iarla Ó Lionáird has carved a long and unique career in music in Ireland. From his iconic early recording of the vision song Aisling Gheal as a young boy to his ground breaking recordings with...