Composer Donnacha Dennehy’s work Glamour Sleeper has been featured in a new Adidas advertising campaign. The video features several skateboarders in an urban setting, their ollies and tricks syncronised with the music.

Glamour Sleeper, for cello, violin, double bass, percussion and electronics was premiered at the 2002 Up North! Festival at Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Reviewing the work at the time in The Journal of Music, John McLachlan wrote:

Made out of highly unsubtle sound production – lots of dirty scratching from strings and hard edged percussion – and limited, even crude pitch resources …. The organising principles governing everything else were the opposite, refined and tasteful. 

Writing about the festival in the same issue in January 2003, Barra Ó Séaghdha said, ‘The thumping in his Glamour Sleeper made its point so relentlessly as to detract from the interesting rhythmic tensions and lurches in the construction of the piece.’

In 2005, Bob Gilmore commented on the work in The Journal of Music in an essay on Dennehy: ‘This is music of great rhythmic sophistication, splintered and noisy, and takes us to the extremes of his sonic imagination…. as always with Dennehy, the exhilarating (some would say demented) sonic invention is supported by fantastic melodic and harmonic invention.’

Glamour Sleeper was later released in 2007 on Dennehy’s portrait album Elastic Harmonic on NMC Recordings, performed by ensemble Intégrales. Reviewing the recording, Michael Quinn wrote, ‘There’s a hint, a pulsating scent, of Roger Doyle in some of its darker nooks and crannies, but in its bright, buoyantly brusque handling of the material, it could only belong to Dennehy.’

View the Adidas video below.

Dennehy’s opera The Second Violinist will be performed at the Barbican on 6–8 September. For more, visit www.barbican.org.uk.