Booking available HERE from 10am Monday 27th May
From the sculpture hall of the Hugh Lane Gallery :
Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble
Programme
3 movements on the work of William Scott (2017)
Greg Caffrey (1963)
Beneath the Dark Blue Waves (2019)*Jane O’Leary (1946)
The Light Within (2007)
John Luther Adams (1953)
In the Light of Air – Serenity (2014) Anna Thorvaldsdottir (1977)
Largely inspired by the visual arts, this programme highlights music which encourages us to consider and imagine various visual elements. William Scott, whose works hang in the Ulster Museum, is the focus for our Featured Composer Greg Caffrey.
There is an Irish-American connection, Jane O’Leary, with her atmospheric vision of Gwen O’Dowd’s abstract sea paintings and John Luther Adams The Light Within. He describes the inspiration behind the piece “On a crisp autumn day sitting inside Meeting – Turrell’s skyspace at PS1 in Queens, New York – I experienced my own epiphany of light. From mid-afternoon through sunset into night, I was transfixed by the magical interplay of light and colour, above and within. Over the hours the sky descended through every nameless shade of blue, to heaviest black. The light within the space rose from softest white, through ineffable yellow to deepest orange. Just after sunset there came a moment when outside and inside met in perfect equipoise. The midnight blue of the sky and the burnished peach of the room came together, fusing into one vibrant yet intangible plane…light becoming colour, becoming substance.”
The spacious and thoughtful atmosphere of this work carries through to the end of the concert with a work by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, whose “musical material is constructed with a focus on subtle nuances and poetic textures…”. Her score is imbued with beauty and fragility and performance directions such as “Soloistic with calm & ease and subtle sense of brokenness” complete our transcendence into ambient artistry.
* Commissioned by HRSE with funds from the ACNI Small Grants Programme
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Sundays at Noon Concert Series June 2024
This June, Sundays at Noon is delighted to present this selection of concerts in June which includes a Gamelan orchestra in the hall for the first time on June 16th.
We welcome back the Hard Rain Solost Ensemble from Belfast to the gallery with a concert inspired by the visual arts on the 2nd and Evlana Ensemble return on the 9th June with an octet presenting work from American and Irish composers and Schoenberg’s Chamber symphony (arr. Webern). An exciting collaboration between percussionist Bianca Gannon and the ConTempo quartet premieres on the 23rd and this season closes with the dynamic Crash Ensemble performing the world premiere of ‘When I became the Sun’ by Ian Wilson with pieces by Amanda Feery and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly.
Admission to all Sunday at Noon concerts is free but ticketed.
Booking is available Monday before each concert from 10am. Please see our website- what’s on section for listings, or subscribe to the mailing list here for news and availability. All concerts are broadcast on the gallery’s YouTube channel in a ‘Concert Catch-up’ at noon the following week, subject to agreement from the artists.
