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Ivan Hewett introduces four recent works by Irish composers and specially recorded at Belfast's Sonorities 2013 festival of contemporary music, Beyond Soundscape. Donal Sarsfield's work for solo violin and strings explores the natural space between water and wood: an amplified violin weaves its way through taped sounds of an old chair squeeking and the night rain falling. Ryan Molloy recalls the old ways of Irish music and culture as if in a dream. Donnacha Dennehy's concerto for amplified violin and orchestra Elastic Harmonic places the violin like a "floating body over the orchestra, " and David Fennessy's inspiration was an image he had of a microscopic orchestra all seated in the swirl of a fingerprint: at the point of contact between a bowed open string and a violinist's finger an entire orchestral sound was seeps out from beneath it.
Recorded at an Ulster Orchestra ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 3 Invitation Concert for Hear and Now

Donal Sarsfield: Between Wood and Water for string orchestra and tape
with Darragh Morgan (violin), Ulster Orchestra, David Brophy (conductor)

Ryan Molloy: Third Epistle to Timothy
Ulster Orchestra, David Brophy (conductor)

Donnacha Dennehy: Elastic Harmonic
with Darragh Morgan (amplified violin), Ulster Orchestra, David Brophy (conductor)

David Fennessy: This is how it feels (Another Bolero)
Ulster Orchestra, David Brophy (conductor).