Composing the Island: Wayfarers - Ian Wilson Premiere
John Field Room, National Concert Hall
Chamber Choir Ireland, Vanbrugh Quartet, conductor Ian Wilson.
Programme
Deirdre Gribbin: hearing your genes evolve
John Kinsella: Quartet No. 5
Ian Wilson: Wayfarers (premiere)
As part of Composing the Island: A century of music in Ireland 1916 – 2016
Ian Wilson on Wayfarers, a work which was commissioned by the National Concert Hall and Triskel Christchurch Cork with funds from the Arts Council of Ireland:
Wayfarers is a nine-movement work for choir, soloists and string quartet that sets poems and texts by some of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising and by poets that knew them or were their contemporaries. Five poem settings for full choir are interspersed with four settings of texts for soloists taken from, in turn, a letter from Joseph Plunkett to his fiancée Grace Gifford, Pádraic Pearse’s court martial address, a letter from Pearse to his mother and Roger Casement’s last written words.
Wayfarers explores the motivations behind, and context for the 1916 Rising. The work seeks to engage with a historic event on a human scale, one that is immediately apprehendable for the listener and which is, frankly, of greatest interest to me.