Last Saturday the 9th of November saw New Dublin Voices, conducted by their founder Bernie Sherlock, perform a wide array of new and existing music at the Pepper Canister Church. The idea of the concert began with six commissions of settings of words by W.B. Yeats funded by the Arts Council, and thus it featured premieres by David Coonan, Áine Mallon, Jonathan Nangle, Anselm McDonnell, Laura Hawley and Roxanna Panufnik. These were sprinkled among other settings of Yeats, alongside some Shakespeare, for a fairly robust two-hour performance.

Most impressive of the premieres was Jonathan Nangle’s O Curlew, which drew hearty applause from the audience. Setting ‘He Reproves the Curlew’, Nangle approaches the poem from an environmental angle. Where Yeats reproves the bird for reminding him of ‘passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair’, Nangle mourns its loss – as of 2023, there are fewer than 120 breeding pairs of the native Eurasian Curlew in Ireland. Nangle uses the opening words, ‘O Curlew’, almost as a mantra, and emphasises the word ‘cry’ (or ‘crying’), which occurs three times in the six-line poem. The song is utterly heartbreaking, opening onto a plaintive chord each time we hear the word ‘Curlew’, and ending slow and sad as members of the choir whistle imitations of its lonely call over still harmony.

British composer Roxanna Panufnik’s Elemental Power used the choir in some interesting ways, beginning with a Julia Wolfe-esque ostinato on the word ‘Powers’, and employing vocal echoes and an imaginatively harmonised chorale. Anselm McDonnell’s approach to The Mother of God’s opening line – ‘The threefold terror of love’ – in three- and then four-part counterpoint, was refreshing, and he used some lovely dynamic effects capturing a good sense of the poem’s confrontation of the vast.

In Her Anxiety, David Coonan’s harmonic approach is reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s uncomfortable tonality. The poem’s twice-repeated refrain, ‘Prove that I lie’, is first almost reticent, then later a challenge. Coonan adds a third repetition to the end of the setting, the voice parts drifting off in small glissandi like sirens.

I wasn’t as convinced by Áine Mallon’s When You Are Old – although the wandering solos on the words ‘the pilgrim soul in you’ were some of the best word painting in the night – or by the pastoral melodies and cheery ‘ladadadada’ of Laura Hawley’s setting of The White Birds, though the choir visibly enjoyed singing it.

A rising spitfire
Three other settings rounded out the Yeats side of the programme, at least two of which have close links with the choir: Seán Doherty, who sings in the bass section, set An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, in it providing another very effective moment of word painting, the choir mimicking a rising spitfire, and the Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi’s The Stolen Child, commissioned by New Dublin Voices in 2017, makes good use of the poem’s contrasting sections, with a haunting, unearthly melody in the refrain. Eoghan Desmond’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree, which opened the concert, used a chorale-like central section as a balance to busier outer parts.

So Yeats was the main event, but amongst the settings of his poetry were a number of Shakespeare songs. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs provided some welcome dissonance (especially the haunting opening of Full Fathom Five), while a number of arrangements by American composer Matthew Harris lent the words a groove-driven, mid-twentieth century popular feel, and Ward Swingle’s It Was a Lover and His Lass gave Shakespeare an unmistakeable 1950s buoyancy. Mäntyjärvi closed the concert with the peculiar – but very fun – Juliet November Tango Remix, a sort of five-minute micro-opera, which the choir performed without a conductor. It’s an extremely loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet using only words from the NATO alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, etc.). Conceptually it might be a little Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, but as a closer (before an encore arrangement of Down By the Salley Gardens) it at least got the audience to Lima Oscar Lima.

That is quite a lot for a single concert, and there were times when I felt that the breadth of the programme worked against it. O Curlew, for instance, would have been difficult to follow under any circumstances, but the mood switch to Matthew Harris’ light rock Shakespeare setting, Sigh No More, Ladies, was rather jarring. I suppose that this is an almost inevitable product of any concert built on a large number of short pieces, especially one with several new commissions like this, but it did leave me feeling at times like I’d have preferred an event with a more focussed musical through-line. But despite a two-hour performance, singing often quite challenging music, the choir was as full of life at the end as at the beginning. New Dublin Voices’ reputation as being among the best Irish amateur choirs is not lightly earned, and, though not every song worked for me, I never grew tired of listening to them sing.

Visit www.newdublinvoices.com.

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