Chamber Choir Ireland to Premiere Major New Ian Wilson Work

Chamber Choir Ireland to Premiere Major New Ian Wilson Work

New work composed in response to 1916 Easter Rising.

As part of its new autumn–winter season, Chamber Choir Ireland, with Artistic Director Paul Hillier, will premiere a major new work by composer Ian Wilson in Dublin and Cork.

Wayfarers is a large-scale work for mixed choir and string quartet, commissioned by the National Concert Hall and written as a response to the 1916 Easter Rising. Premiering the work with CCI will be the renowned Vanbrugh Quartet.

Wilson’s work features five poem settings interspersed with settings of extracts from letters by proclamation signatory Joseph Plunkett to his fiancée, and from Rising leader Patrick Pearse to his mother, as well as portions of Pearse’s court-martial speech and Roger Casement’s last words. The concert will take place as part of the NCH Composing the Island series on Sunday 25 September and then visit the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork on Friday 30 September.

Featured in the same concert are hearing your genes evolve by Deirdre Gribbin and Quartet No. 5 by John Kinsella. The soloists from Chamber Choir Ireland are Abbi Temple (soprano) and Jeffrey Ledwidge (bass).

Autumn–Winter Season
In October in Belfast, CCI’s season continues with a repeat of the Choirland programme that they have just performed as part of Composing the Island. The programme, a celebration of 100 years of Irish choral music, features works by Stanford, David Fennessy, Gerald Barry, Arnold Bax, Brian Boydell, Aloys Fleischmann, Stephen McNeff, and Eoghan Desmond.

On 21–31 October, CCI will undertake a five-date national tour in the company of Chatham Saxophone Quartet, performing a programme of spiritual music, including works by Ockeghem, Pärt, Britten, Gesualdo, Obrecht, Schein Bruckner and Kancheli. The concerts will be led by renowned British musicologist and conductor James Wood.

Des Earley (organ) and Malachy Robinson (violone) will join the choir on 18/19 November in Waterford and Dublin for two concerts that will fuse Brazilian folk with Bach, comprising the Bach motets Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden and Singet dem Herrn, Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9, as well as pieces by Kagel and Berg. 

The choir’s season draws towards an end with a free concert at the Axis in Ballymena on 16 December, in which up to 60 singers from Ballymun and surrounding areas will perform with the choir in a very special event titled SING!

This will be followed by two concerts at St Thomas’s Parish Church, Belfast, and Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, on 17/18 December featuring a selection of seasonal works interspersed with traditional readings from the Old and New Testaments. 

For full details on Chamber Choir Ireland’s new season, download the brochure below, or visit https://www.chamberchoirireland.com/

Published on 19 September 2016

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