The outstanding Sonoro Quartet, featuring Cork violist Séamus Hickey, returns for a third tour for the Foundation.
Donnacha Dennehy’s Chorale was premiered at the 2023 West Cork Chamber Music Festival. The composer writes that “when this piece first opens it may seem unusual that it has the title Chorale. But gradually chorales emerge from these whirling maelstroms of heightened anxiety, like mists emanating from storm patterns… Some of these harmonies are taken from a Bach chorale with the text ‘your word was for a long time obscured’ .”
Osvaldo Golijov’s hauntingly beautiful Tenebrae reflects both the brutality of human conflict and the parallel perspective of the earth’s serene progress through space. It was written in 2000 when the composer found himself caught up in the latest wave of violence in the Middle East but then just a week later visited the New York planetarium with his five-year-old son, viewing the earth as a small dot amongst the stars of the cosmos.
Shostakovich wrote his fifth quartet in the last months of Stalin’s repressive rule over the Soviet Union. This was a time when, accused by the authorities of writing music that “dwells too much on the dark and fearful aspects of reality”, Shostakovich had been forced to read a humiliating apology and to promise to mend his ways. He composed a series of patriotic cantatas and film scores to please Soviet officialdom, while wisely delaying publication of this quartet, his ‘real’ music, until after Stalin’s death. It is a work of great contrasts with many moments of sublime beauty, but, unsurprisingly, dark shadows are always lurking.
In association with the National String Quartet Foundation.
Tickets €17 available from https://triskelartscentre.ie/events/sonoro-quartet/
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