New Music Dublin is Ireland's foremost contemporary music festival; running from April 25th to 28th, 2024 at the National Concert Hall. this year's NMD programme features 27 world premieres and 17 Irish premieres.
Below, we select a quintet of highlights from this year's programme.
Diatribe: there will be no silence
Thursday 25th April, 1 pm, National Concert Hall
Kicking off this year's NMD festival is a performance marrying the worlds of music, poetry and theatre featuring two of Ireland's best-known and best-loved actors - Owen Roe and Aisling O’Sullivan.
there will be no silence is a meeting point between music and poetry—a call and response between instrument and voice where the language of music and the strain of words converge. Portraying an intricate dance of connection and disconnection, this collaborative work by emmy-nominated composer David Downes and acclaimed poet Adam Wyeth reveals the complex inner workings of a couple’s shared shadow world.
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Bringing to life the unspoken words, regrets and longings of a relationship through facets of sound, musicality and silence, legends of the stage and screen Owen Roe and Aisling O’Sullivan are joined for this lunchtime performance opening NMD 2024’s multi-venue Diatribe Stage by Rolf Hind, one of the greatest contemporary pianists of today, and Adrian Mantu, renowned cellist and founder of ConTempo Quartet.
Decoder + Laura Bowler: ADVERT
Thursday 25th April, 9:00 pm, National Concert Hall
ADVERT, by 'triple threat composer-performer-provocatrice’ Laura Bowler, is an exploration of the self in the context of an increasingly tribalist society. Fusing music, multimedia, staging, physical performance and live tattoo-making it wavers between truth and fiction, extreme openness and fragmented memories—confronting the tension between the need to advertise a particular "selfness" to our desired tribe, and our longing for authenticity.
‘The sheer energy behind it is irresistible,’ wrote Andrew Clements in The Guardian after the work’s 2023 premiere—for which Bowler was joined, as she is for this late-evening NMD performance, by Leipzig-based artist and tattooist Julia Rehme and the innovative, unpredictable Decoder Ensemble. Drawing on autobiography alongside original words by Sam Redway and texts from several other writers, this deeply personal interrogation of identity and selfhood exposes a vulnerability that, literally, draws blood.
(Warning: this performance contains video projection of tattooing taking place live on stage, including blood and skin damage)
National Symphony Orchestra with soloist Iarla Ó Lionáird
Friday 26th April, 7:30 pm, National Concert Hall
From dreamlike, clouded visions of the future to fiery, virtuosic playing on the edge of possibility, this performance by the National Symphony Orchestra features two Irish premieres alongside the world premiere of Tuile agus Trá, a newly commissioned work by award-winning composer Linda Buckley for orchestra and singer Iarla Ó Lionáird.
Opening the concert is SLEEPTALKER by Robin Haigh (2023 recipient of the NCH Jerome Hynes Young Composer Award), an atmospheric exploration of dreams as metaphors for predictions of the future - while Donnacha Dennehy's Violin Concerto with acclaimed soloist Stephen Waarts brings the evening to a conclusion.
National Symphony Orchestra & Winged Victory for the Sullen: Ambient / Symphony
Saturday 27th April, 7:00 pm, National Concert Hall
This one-off double bill pairs a live set by A Winged Victory For The Sullen, frontrunners of the ambient music vanguard, with the achingly beautiful final symphony of Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra.
Written shortly before the composer's untimely death in 2018, A Prayer to the Dynamo was inspired by Jóhannsson's fascination with technology; in particular field recordings he made at Iceland's Elliðaár power plant. Underpinned by the hypnotic reverberations of these recordings, Jóhannsson’s masterwork provides the ideal prelude to a set from two of his friends and collaborators, cult ambient music duo A Winged Victory For The Sullen. Renowned for their stirring, cinematic soundscapes, Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran’s set at NMD 2024 comes in the wake of acclaimed performances at some of the world’s most celebrated venues, including the Barbican and the BBC Proms.
Crash Ensemble perform Ann Cleare’s TERRARIUM
Venture into the landscape of time with this eagerly anticipated world premiere, as you journey with Crash Ensemble deep through time to a vanished Mesolithic lake in the centre of Ireland.
TERRARIUM was commissioned and written in 2020 during Ann Cleare’s time as composer in residence with Crash, and created in collaboration with site-responsive artists Lay of the Land and videographer and director Laura Sheeran. Immersive and multi-layered, this exploration of the evolving geological strata of Ireland’s boglands transports you to one of the earliest sites of human activity in the country’s history at Lough Boora, Offaly—peeling back layers of memory and myth embedded within its fascinating, post-industrial terrain.
New Music Dublin runs from April 25th to 28th, 2024 at the National Concert Hall, Dublin - find out more here.
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