National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Ryan McAdams - Donnacha Dennehy: Limina National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Ryan McAdams

Nonesuch Records releases Grammy Award-winning composer Donnacha Dennehy’s Limina, which features premiere recordings of two pieces: the piano concerto Limina and Violin Concerto, performed by National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, conductor Ryan McAdams, pianist Eliza McCarthy, and violinist Stephen Waarts. The album was recorded at the National Concert Hall, Dublin.

In an interview between Dennehy and the pianist and composer Timo Andres that appears in the liner notes, Dennehy says of the pieces’ pairing on this album:

“The Violin Concerto came first. And it was supposed to premiere in 2020, but obviously ... we know what happened there. That was actually my first multi-movement concerto. It really took on the idea of the concerto form, because Augustin Hadelich [the violinist for whom the concerto was originally written] was very eager for me to write a multi-movement piece. That’s even why I called it what I called it—because I had written a piece for violin and orchestra called Elastic Harmonic, which is deliberately an anti-concerto.

“And then Limina was last. I wanted to be more wry with the form, to have a bit of joy. There’s a playfulness to it, especially the outer movements,” he continues. “The cadenzas happen at the ends of the movements and come out of transcending this threshold. And only in the last one does the soloist go back and forth with the chamber orchestra. I felt I was pushing against something.”

Hailed as “Ireland’s most important living composer” by the New York Times, Donnacha Dennehy’s Grammy Award-winning music has been called “thrilling” (Guardian), “mesmerizing” (New York Times), “arrestingly beautiful” (New Yorker), and “shockingly original, while also being compulsively listenable” (Boston Globe).