'A sanctuary of music': Donnacha Dennehy on West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Donnacha Dennehy is one of the participants in West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Picture: Hugh O'Conor
Donnacha Dennehy has been a leading light in contemporary Irish music since the foundation of the Crash Ensemble, over 25 years ago. The baton in that group has been passed to the cellist Kate Ellis, with Dennehy taking up a teaching role in Princeton nine years ago. Not that he hasn’t kept busy as a composer. Over the past several years, he has branched into the dramatic and operatic: witness his famine “docu-cantata” The Hunger, and his trilogy of operas with Enda Walsh.
This summer, however, sees his return to what he calls the more “austere” musical world of chamber music, with a new commission, Chorale for String Quartet, to be premiered by the Pacifica Quartet at West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Dennehy is also appearing in a public interview, and hosting a workshop for young composers.
“The quartet format feels more internal and private,” Dennehy says, ahead of his trip to Bantry. He contrasts this to working with bigger groups and arrangements. “I do like a kind of massive sound, a kind of density of sound … I love the way instruments interact to create this kind of vibrant texture, where it’s like everyone sliding against each other. But when it comes to a quartet, or something really pared back, you have to create that kind of feeling some other way and I love that kind of challenge, you know, with just four voices. There's part of me that would love to multiply that by two or three, but then I also enjoy the kind of austere challenge.”
Dennehy’s new piece has some of its roots in the classroom, he says, as well as his relatively new interest in swimming. In his teaching of Bach’s chorale harmonies, he says he’s become fascinated by ones that are “almost modal. They're almost pre-tonal. They have really interesting characteristics,” he says. He’s based the fundamental harmony in his new work on a Bach original, though heavily disguised, he says. “I do these experiments, where I slow them down or overlap on top of each other and I do things like where I add overtones to the chorales, and then strip away the chorale.”
In Dennehy’s conception, the string piece unfurls in a series of what he thinks of as breaths. “I've taken up swimming quite earnestly in the last couple of years,” he says. “And there you have to really think about breathing. At the start I had my head above the water but you can’t go very far with that. So I think that influenced my thinking on the mechanics of breathing, these large breaths. When you hear the opening of the piece you might think… why the hell is he calling it chorale? It starts in this turbulent tumble.”
But, he says, it “unfolds like breaths … and the chorale reveals itself.” If his new piece is marked by a kind of austerity, the setting for the West Cork festival is anything but: the lush surrounds of West Cork in high summer, the festival centred on Bantry House in its spectacular setting overlooking the bay.
Dennehy was last here in 2017. “I really enjoyed this incredibly beautiful setting,” he says. “I love the fact that you go to Cork station and then you kind of have to drive all the miles and country roads to get there. You feel like you’re going to some sort of sanctuary of music. And it’s a wonderful thing that they have created there.”
Often today, you could be forgiven for thinking classical music, or art music, or new music, or whatever name you want to call it, is in a permanent state of crisis. We read of ageing audiences, of cuts to funding, of things like the BBC Singers’ uncertain fate, of the likes of Simon Rattle stark diagnosing a “fight for existence” for the artform. One can have a transcendent musical experience, then turn around and see a half-empty hall and wonder why more people aren’t sharing it with you.
But Dennehy is notably upbeat about the Irish scene. He recalls the vitality around Dublin during this spring’s New Music Dublin Festival, and he nods to how Francis Humphrys, artistic director of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, has created a festival that is at once artistically rigorous but utterly intertwined with the local community.
“There’s a real feeling of pride in this festival,” he says. “I think people appreciate when you just try and present something at a really committed level. That gives it a very special quality. And I also think there’s definitely a real sense of this type of music as a living organism being presented in the festival, commissioning new works, and presenting it in different ways: presenting it in halls around the town, like church halls, really weaving it into the fabric of the community. And yes, there’s no diluting of the offering going on or anything.”
- The Pacifica Quartet play Donnacha Dennehy’s Chorale as part of a main evening concert on June 26. He appears in conversation with Evelyn Grant that morning at the Brick Oven, and host the Young Composers Forum on June 25. West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Friday, June 23 to July 2. See westcorkmusic.ie
JS Bach can be heard echoing in Donnacha Dennehy’s new piece, but the baroque maestro weaves a thread through the wider festival too. The Ardeo Quartet plays a transcribed version of the Goldberg Variations (June 24, St Brendan’s Church). Johannes Pramsohler and Philippe Grisvard examine “Bach’s legacy” in a morning concert of violin sonatas on June 25 at St Brendan’s Church. Cedric Pescia plays a selection from the French Suites (June 26, Bantry House). Ensemble Diderot and Anna Devin perform works including Bach’s harpsichord concerto (June 28, St Brendan’s Church). And there’s a “encounter with Bach” on July 1 by Johannes Pramsohler and Jadran Duncumb at the Christian Fellowship Church.
The lynchpin of the festival, as ever, are the main evening concerts at Bantry House. Highlights include June 23’s opening night ranging across the centurie as Mairead Hickey and Jeremie Moreau perform Grazyna Bacewicz’s 1945 work Sonata da camera for violin; Alina Ibragimova, Cedric Tiberghien perform Schumann’s Violin Sonata No 2; and the Pacifica Quartet give a European premiere to Sean Shepherd’s String Quartet No 3 before finishing with some Mozart. On June 24, Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien return to Schumann before the Pacifica Quartet perform Beethoven’s glorious Quartet No 15. On June 30, Viviane Hagner, Claudio Bohórquez, and Lilit Grigoryan perform piano trios from Brahms and Mendelssohn. The finale concert on July 2 takes Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, before Viviane Hagner, Mairead Hickey, Emma Wernig, Seamus Hickey, Claudio Bohorquez, Christopher Marwood come together for Brahms’ second string sextet.
If a full day’s music isn’t enough, the festival offers musical nightcaps at Bantry House and other venues, including the Ardeo Quartet playing Beethoven’s Quartet No 9 and No 16 on different nights, and Nurit Stark on solo violin (June 24). On June 30 at St Brendan’s Church Jonian Kadesha and Vashti Hunter play duos by Xennakis and Skalkottas before Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello.
