DENNEHY Land of Winter

Record and Artist Details

Genre:

Orchestral

Label: Nonesuch

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 52

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 7559 78994-8

7559 78994-8. DENNEHY Land of Winter

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Land of Winter Donnacha Dennehy, Composer
Alan Pierson, Conductor
Alarm Will Sound

Donnacha Dennehy’s first album for Nonesuch, ‘Grá agus Bás’ (8/11), engaged with Ireland’s rich cultural and musical heritage, while his second, ‘The Hunger’ (A/19), explored its harrowing historical past. ‘Land of Winter’ sees the composer focus on the country’s often unforgiving climate and landscape. With each movement named after a different month, the sequence starts with December and ends with November. This ensures that the seasonal cycle pivots around winter, reflecting Dennehy’s observation that the Latin name for Ireland was Hibernia (meaning ‘land of winter’).

While the work is not obviously programmatic, it’s difficult not to read various extramusical qualities into each movement. Artificial harmonics and microtones mingle with consonant sounds in ‘December’, suggesting a strange and other-worldly landscape, while the persistent rocking motion in ‘January’ evokes a desolate, windbitten scene. ‘February’ projects the kind of power and punch associated with Dennehy’s erstwhile teacher, Louis Andriessen, while ‘March’ draws on ‘December’ for its ominous presence.

A more hopeful mood accompanies the spring and summer months, as if viewed by the composer through an American lens. Rising and falling pentatonic patterns impart a bluesier sound in ‘April’, while the animated vocal scatting of ‘May’ eases into the languid lyricism of ‘June’ – the latter’s smooth and silky lines bathing in a pool of diatonicism. The land of winter is briefly transformed into a still lake in summer.

Joyful ‘July’ gives way to lazy ‘August’ – lethargic and bloated brass chords hinting at the heaviness of high summer – while ‘September’ darts around with energetic urgency, as if aware that time is running out. A tug-of-war between stasis and movement implies that the days become shorter and the nights longer in ‘October’, and the cycle ends with one of its best movements, ‘November’, which returns full circle to the barren, windbitten atmosphere of ‘December’.

JS Bach’s Advent chorale Wie soll ich dich empfangen forms one connecting thread in an imaginatively conceived and subtly integrated work, where spectralist gestures rub shoulders with post-minimalist patterns and folk-like drones with microtonality. Benefiting once more from a top-notch performance from the ever-reliable Alarm Will Sound directed by Alan Pierson (to whom the work is dedicated), Land of Winter offers further proof, if it were required, that Dennehy is Ireland’s most significant composer to have emerged since Gerald Barry.

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