THE international profile of Irish composers continues to grow and browsing the Calendar on this web site provides an invaluable overview of an impressive level activity on the part of Irish composers. In May alone, for instance, Piers Hellawell and Andrew Hamilton have premieres at the Brighton Festival, Damien Harron is touring Japan with his percussion group, Backbeat, and Rhona Clarke has performances in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Frank Corcoran’s music is featured at the Elektrisk Helg festival in Sweden and a new work by Donnacha Dennehy is to be premiered by the Aurelia Saxophone Quartet in the Netherlands, while Mary McAuliffe’s Irish Blessings will be given in Atlanta.

Irish composers living abroad are also active. Klanggang, a sound installation by Swiss/Irish composer and musician John Wolf Brennan is running in the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne until 13 July. The lakeside location and contemporary architecture of the museum inspired the installation, which combines musical sounds with the everyday noises of the area surrounding it. The eclectic instrumentation, as described by the composer, includes piano, prepared piano, melodica, children’s toys, plastic bottles, assorted percussion instruments and field recordings of environmental sounds. There will also be a Klanggang live performance on 22 May, in which Brennan will be joined by performers Chris Cutler (percussion, electronics) and Daniele Patumi (double bass), and the work will be released on CD (MiWi Art Edition 2017).

Another Irish composer living abroad who is busy at the moment is Ailís Ní Ríain. Presently based in the UK, she was the recipient of the Soroptimist International Award for Composition 2002 in association with the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, where she is now Junior Fellow in Education. She has also gained a PCRNCM, the College’s professional postgraduate qualification in composition. She was selected to participate in the Opera Writing Course run by Aldeburgh Productions with the Genesis Foundation in March 2003 and will attend the Acanthes summer course in France in July to study with Klaus Huber and Gilbert Amy.

Also in July, a highlight for young composer Jürgen Simpson will be the premiere of his second opera, Thwaite, which receives three performances in London as part of the Almeida Opera/Genesis Opera project.

News comes of a commission from the Lorient Festival in Brittany to composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin for Jigsaw, a twenty-minute work for the Lorient Symphony Orchestra which will be premiered at the Festival in August. This is one of a series of Festival commissions of Irish, Welsh, Breton and Scottish composers. Also in August, Raymond Deane (piano) and Maurizio Barbetti (viola) perform a concert of Deane’s music in the Santa Maria Nuova Musica Festival in Italy.

Nearer to home, Jane O’Leary’s tenure as composer-in-residence at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, which is sadly being discontinued in June, culminates with the premiere on 5 May in The Helix of a specially-commissioned work, Snapshots, written for the RIAM Chamber Orchestra and its director Liz Csibi. O’Leary’s work with contemporary ensemble, Concorde, continues unabated with performances in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, on 18 May (music by Bill Campbell, Dermot Healy and Jennifer Fowler) and 15 June (works by Ed Bennett, Rob Canning, Cheil Meijering and Erkki Sven Tüur).

Later in the year, John McLachlan has been commissioned by Irish contemporary ensemble Vox21 to write an eleven-minute string trio entitled Radical Roots. This will be premiered by the group in Dublin in October and will also receive a performance in RTÉ’s Living Music Festival 2004. Vincent Kennedy is writing a Suite for clarinet, violin and cello for the Strands Ensemble, commissioned by Annette Cleary for the group. This will be premiered at the Bantry Festival in October. Kennedy has recently received an Irish Government Award for exceptional work in education.

Ian Wilson is to write a new five-minute duo for double bass and marimba for double bass player Malachy Robinson in a commission from Lyric FM for broadcast performance in spring 2004. He is also writing a wind quintet for the group Harlequin, commissioned by Making Music, the Association of British Music Societies. This will be premiered in Autumn 2003 and taken on tour in England subsequently. Wilson, who was the subject of a Festival Feature at the recent Vogler Spring Festival in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, travels to Italy in June to be a juror at the composition competition run by Ensemble Antidogma Musica in Turin, where his new work, Currach, will also be performed.