Thomas Bartlett of the Gloaming and American composer Nico Muhly will be performing their new project Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music at The National Concert Hall on Wednesday June 6th. This will be one of three venues to host the performance as well as St. Luke’s in London and Le Poisson Rouge in New York.
The concert is part of the NCH Perspectives Series 2018 which aims to ‘get you thinking, open your mind and stretch your imagination’.
The National Concert Hall is presenting its Perspectives series 2018 a series of gigs that aims to ‘get you thinking, open your mind and stretch your imagination’.
Gigs include:
Ambient musician Harold Budd on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st April 2018. Tickets priced at €25
American vocalist Haley Fohr orCircuit des Yeux on Sunday, May 13th. Tickets priced at €20.
Pianist and producer Thomas Bartlett and contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly performing Balinese Ceremonial music on Wednesday, June 6th. Tickets priced at €25.
Founding member of The Velvet Underground John Cale on Saturday, June 16th. Tickets priced at €30.
Norwegian pop artist Susanna performing her Go Dig My Grave album on Tuesday, September 25th. Tickets priced at €20.
All tickets go on sale this Friday March 2nd and are available from nch.ie.
Donal Dineen and Myles O’Reilly’s This Ain’t No Disco online TV show recently travelled to New York with Villagers’ Conor O’Brien with the help of St. Patrick’s Festival.
There, they met up with composer Nico Muhly and recorded a collaboration between then. The result is the beautiful new song ‘Fortunate Child’, which was released today. The accompanying video was shot by Dineen while in New York.
Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly and James McAlister have made a collaborative album called Planetarium together that will come out on 4AD on June 9th.
Planetarium is a reimagined version of a project that first got under way some years ago and combines Sufjan’s often treated voice, McAlister’s beats, Dessner’s guitar, and Muhly’s instrumental compositions. It’s been described as “part rock odyssey, part electronic experiment, part classical opus”.
Stevens’ lyrics address “mythology, astrology, science, astronomy and the intricacies of human consciousness.”
Here’s ‘Saturn’
The album began when Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven commissioned Muhly to create a new piece and he enlisted friends Dessner, Stevens and McAlister, all of whom had been looking for the opportunity to collaborate on a larger scale.
After sketching the framework of the song cycle and performing the piece as a band – flanked by a string quartet and seven trombones – in various forms, the quartet put the project on hold for several years. Returning to the raw material in 2016, Stevens and McAlister reversed their typical process, taking recordings of the live show and adapting to the studio. “We had recorded all the arrangements and the live parts in a studio after our last performance,” says Stevens, “so years later when we all kind of settled down, we said, ‘let’s open Pandora’s box.’”
Stevens and McAlister worked to arrange Muhly’s symphonic framework and Dessner’s guitar virtuosity alongside their own lyrics and beats. Stevens became the driver behind the “song” part of the song cycle, his unique voice providing a clear and coherent center of gravity for the whole project.
In the time between Planetarium’s conception and release, Muhly wrote a new viola concerto and a commission for the Metropolitan Opera; Dessner released Trouble Will Find Me with The National, toured extensively and moved to Paris; and Stevens recorded and released Carrie & Lowell and, with McAlister, toured the album worldwide.
PLANETARIUM Tracklist
1. Neptune 2. Jupiter 3. Halley’s Comet 4. Venus 5. Uranus 6. Mars 7. Black Energy 8. Sun 9. Tides 10. Moon 11. Pluto 12. Kuiper Belt 13. Black Hole 14. Saturn 15. In the Beginning 16. Earth 17. Mercury
