John Corigliano, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, October 20, 2009
WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO’S opera The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade. The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of [...]

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Beyond the soundtrack of the boom: Composer Bill Whelan

First Published: The Irish Times, March 14th, 2009
DEPRESSION HAS TO be outside of our options at the moment,” says Bill Whelan. He’s talking about Ireland. He’s talking about the end of that era in Irish history to which some believe Whelan himself, with Riverdance in 1994, wrote the official soundtrack: the Celtic Tiger. Which is [...]

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Philip Glass, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, 28 June, 2008

IF THE PERFORMANCE calendar on his website is anything to go by, July looks set to be a month full of the music of Philip Glass. In Emden, Germany, there will be a performance of Glassworks, the 1982 chamber work with which he broke through to popular audiences, [...]

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John Barry, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, June 14, 2008
‘I DON’T KNOW why they stopped using these things,” says John Barry, of the old-fashioned moviola machine which stands in the corner of his study. “Noisy as hell, but they’re still the best.” He pats the moviola, a sturdy freeze-framing contraption in retro grey steel, so bulky it [...]

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David Lang, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, June 9, 2008
IMAGINE YOU’RE a New York-based composer, living in Manhattan and reckoning with those same challenges of space and of square footage that every Manhattan resident must face. You live in a Soho loft, but not in one of those Soho lofts that resembles an aircraft hangar; yours is [...]

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The Young@Heart Chorus

First Published: The Irish Times, September 28, 2007
IT looks like every community centre in the world. On the corner of two busy roads out of Florence, a suburb of a suburb of Springfield, Massachusetts, it sits with its windows and doors open to the neighbourhood – and most of the neighbourhood speeding past it. It [...]

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Beckett, Rhyme and Reason: Meeting Paul Muldoon’s Rackett

First Published: The Irish Times, August 22, 2007
IT’S A SUNNY Saturday afternoon in Princeton, New Jersey, with students slowly beginning to drift back to the campus of spires and towers for another year of learning. Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who has taught at the university for more than 15 years, and who currently [...]

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Zach Condon, Musician

First Published: The Irish Times, October 27, 2006
ZACH Condon is unsure about the internet. There are better things to do on a computer, in his view; like create six homemade albums before the age of 16 using a keyboard, a trumpet, a Fisher Price karaoke machine, a family accordion and an old version of ProTools. [...]

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Odetta

First Published: The Irish Times, June 24, 2006
IN AUGUST 1969, when  ABC Television’s Johnny Cash Show was at the height of its popularity, the folk singer Odetta made a guest appearance. A duet with Cash was on the cards, and the producers had in mind what they thought was the perfect number: the American spiritual [...]

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Patti Smith

First Published: The Irish Times, May 20, 2006
Faces stare from the walls of Patti Smith’s Soho brownstone, all of them in stark, unblemished black and white. Most of the faces are so rawly iconic that to see them here like this, hanging as informally as family snapshots, is to feel a shock of recognition. There [...]

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