Successful debut for SoundSet Ensemble at the CMC Christmas Concerts.

The SoundSet Ensemble gave two impressive debut performances at the Contemporary Music Centre’s platform for performance on Wednesday. Celebrating the festive season with a programme entitled Winter Variations, SoundSet presented premieres of new music for Christmas by Jane O Leary, Nick Roth, Stephen Gardner and Anne Marie O’Farrell. With the composers in attendance, the female vocalists of SoundSet rose to the occasion.

These new vocal works challenged and inspired. Written especially for Soundset Anne-Marie O’Farrell’s A Winter’s Prayer with images of fallen snow and glittering wreaths certainly created the atmosphere for a festive performance. Nick Roth’s first work for vocal ensemble entitled Maoz Tsur was based on the tune of a old German drinking song and featured Yiddish text from the Jewish Festival of light, Channukah.  Jane O Leary’s adaptation of the traditional French Carol Ding Dong Merrily on High aimed to create the sense of many bells ringing together and succeeded! Stephen Gardner admitted that in The Mahogony Tree the “counterpoint is tricky enough, but the tune should carry through” and was grateful to Soundset for giving the work its premiere.  These Christmas premieres and other festive pieces by Irish and International composers were well received by the attentive audiences at both the lunchtime and evening performance.

SoundSet, under the direction of Laura Kilty and Emma O’Halloran, aims to put on high quality concerts which feature repertoire from a huge variety of musical genres - contemporary, electronic, Renaissance, Baroque and anything well-written and exciting!

It was a pleasure for the board, director and staff of The Contemporary Music Centre to end 2010 by providing SoundSet with their first performance opportunity in the platform for performance and to nurture the performance of these new works. “We hope this is a sign of many future collaborations for our new space and continuing opportunities for Irish composers to have their work performed” says Karen Hennessy, Promotion Manager, The Contemporary Music Centre.

Listen to audio interviews with composer Nick Roth and SoundSet directors Emma O’Halloran and Laura Kilty.