Longing

Feelings of nostalgia and longing pervade the music for this attractive programme for clarinet, voice and piano which draws together three of Ireland’s most versatile and acclaimed musicians: Sharon Carty, mezzo-soprano, John Finucane, clarinet and Finghin Collins, piano. From the rhapsodic opening bars of Brahms’ late clarinet sonata to Mozart’s operatic fireworks, the programme also includes deeply passionate German songs by Brahms and Spohr and miraculous settings of Yeats and Joyce poems by Muriel Herbert and Rebecca Clarke. At the centre of the programme is “Music of the Hours”, a new work for clarinet and piano by Irish composer Anne-Marie O’Farrell which reflects on the experience of praying the monastic hours.