Land of Winter is the album of Donnacha Dennehy’s eponymous 2022 composition commissioned by Alarm Will Sound, the renowned twenty-member contemporary music ensemble helmed by Alan Pierson. Dennehy has worked with Alarm Will Sound before, notably on his 2016 ‘docu-opera’ The Hunger and its concert version that they put to CD that same year. Land of Winter is a similarly substantial work, and at almost an hour long, it is his largest non-opera work to date.

Like The Hunger and a lot of Dennehy’s music, Land of Winter uses a microtonality informed by the overtone series. What this means is that notes are played out of tune in a precise way to create ‘pure’ ratios. These ‘pure’ ratios are strikingly gorgeous, but in music of any complexity they also interact in ways that result in especially harsh dissonances. Dennehy, in deciding which ratios to make pure and which to allow to become especially impure – and when to just use normal tuning – has thus prepared a palette that is subtly unique.

In The Hunger, this approach is incorporated discreetly into the overall work. Land of Winter, though, is more austere, and its eerie harmonic colour is presented starkly at the outset: chords gently swell and replace each other like shapes in clouds, with neither melody nor rhythm distracting.

This gesture opens the first of twelve movements that follow the calendar starting with December: Dennehy opens with a solstice month, and the change in the length of the day from solstice to solstice, or more precisely the change in light that it brings with it, is the guiding thread of the work. (‘November’ ends with a figure that recalls and returns to the figure with which ‘December’ opens.) However, the winter of the work’s title pervades even high summer, with the haunting opening of ‘December’ reprised in ‘June’, and even ‘July’ sounding cold beneath its surface bounciness. 

Dennehy explains this coldness in the liner notes, which are so detailed that Land of Winter could almost be a symphonic poem: the title is an Anglicisation of Hibernia, the name given to Ireland by the Romans. (The etymology of ‘Hibernia’ doesn’t actually come from ‘winter’ and comes instead via Greek from proto-Irish, but Dennehy is not pretending to be a historian.) Dennehy’s winter colours are unfair to the Irish summer (much as we love to grouse), but he is not representing the heat of summer, but the character of its light and how it differs from winter’s.

Land of Winter had moments of beauty that stopped me short, such as the ‘solstice’ figure that opens the work, the lonely sean-nós-derived ‘refrain’ melody of ‘January’ and ‘October,’ and a raft of details here and there. In some of the very slow movements, such as ‘August’ and ‘November,’ Dennehy’s ear for scintillating, physically affecting harmony is arresting. In all this, Land of Winter reveals Dennehy as a master of his craft. 

Nevertheless, it left me with less than Dennehy put into it. Again and again, I found myself seeing what Dennehy was aiming for, respecting his aim and how he went about achieving it, but feeling that it didn’t quite come together. The precise rhythmic hits of ‘February’ seemed to be syncopated against an implied underlying beat, but I couldn’t hear it and so the hits sounded random and meaningless. But is this just personal? I could well believe that some people could instinctively find the beat, and so be surprised by how it is played against. Or again, ‘April’ and ‘September’ were based on the playing out of musical processes, but it felt rote, academic. ‘May’ attempted to capture the plenitude of spring through having the musicians scat – to break free of the discipline of their instruments, as it were – but it ended up sounding like an odd attempt to incorporate konnakol (a vocal percussion music in Indian classical music). ‘June’ has two simultaneous musical lines: a long, slow melody and a skittering texture. Dennehy seems to be aiming for languor here (watching insects busy at work while we doze on our garden chair), but the skittering overpowers the slow line to my ear – except for the one listen where it did indeed seem warm and slow. Finally, the sharper percussion sounds throughout the work, such as the snare, always gave me an unpleasant start – is this poor orchestration, poor conducting, poor mixing, or just a musical mismatch between Dennehy and myself?

So Land of Winter did not work for me, at least not this time, at least not on this recording. But it perpetually tugged at me, as if I could shift my perspective a few degrees and it would open like spring. Until that day, it will hibernate in my inner ear.

Land of Winter by Donnacha Dennehy and Alarm Will Sound is released on Nonesuch Records. Visit www.nonesuch.com/artists/donnacha-dennehy.

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