There is an Irish theme to the choices, both directly in works like Deirdre McKay’s Plunkett’s Last Words and McNeff’s A Half Darkness (both contemplations on the events in Dublin at Easter 1916), but also more allusively in Judith Bingham's I Have A Secret to Tell and Song of Amergin. The heavens are invoked in Kerry Andrew’s Hevene Quene and The Starlight Night which McNeff wrote as part of a larger choral cycle.

The idea of contemplation and one's place in the cosmos is further developed in the new work The Horizons of Doubt, written after the chance discovery in the crumbling old town of Taranto in Southern Italy of the tomb of Catald, a 7th century Irish monk who lives on there as a saint. As the poet Aoife Mannix describes in her exquisite libretto for the work, "They know me in lands where cathedrals are carved from sunlight. The soft taste of oranges, a language that sows the seeds of summer."

Programme:

Stephen McNeff:The Starlight Night
Kerry Andrew: Hevene Quene
Judith Bingham: Lace Making
Stephen McNeff: The Song of Amergin
Siobhán Cleary: Sweit Rois of Vertew
Deirdre McKay: Plunkett's Last Words
Stephen McNeff: A Half Darkness
Cecilia McDowall: Standing as I do before God
Stephen McNeff: maggie and milly and molly and may
Judith Bingham: I Have a Secret to Tell
Stephen McNeff: The Horizons of Doubt

The Tomb of Catald in the Cathedral in Taranto