Giving a platform to New Music in Dublin

New Music Dublin returns for the second year of an initial five-year commitment this spring, running from March 6-9 at the National Concert Hall.

One of the leading lights of Ireland’s contemporary music scene, Donnacha Dennehy of the Crash Ensemble, takes the reins as festival director this year, and is presenting a menu of composers not often heard in the concert halls of this country: Georg Friedrich Haas, Hans Abrahamsen, Claude Vivier and Harrison Birtwistle.

The featured work from Abrahamsen, Schnee (Snow), will be played by Dennehy’s Crash Ensemble. It’s an hour-long work that grows from opening strings worthy of Bernard Herrmann, overlaid by percussive piano notes, through five sections, or canons, that evoke icy minimalism, flights of colour and occasional dissonant moments. Eleven in the evening seems the perfect time to hear this mesmeric, trance-like piece.