The Journal of Music in Ireland reviews Dennehy World Premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival

"The performance was extraordinary, with Andres and Kaplan bringing some effects I’ve rarely seen"

Excerpts from review by Brendan Finan

Photo Credit: Dylan Vaughan

Kilkenny Arts Festival is not a music festival, though across its ten days it features as many concerts as a fully dedicated music festival might. I attended several of the music events on Saturday 8 August, which included performances by the American piano duo Timo Andres and David Kaplan, a new opera by Michael Gallen, and a performance by a quartet of female musicians from the contemporary and traditional worlds.

The duo of Andres and Kaplan performed two programmes in two days at St John’s Priory, both concluding with Donnacha Dennehy’s new work, Between, which they premiered in the Friday concert.

Written for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Dennehy’s Between is written as a document by an immigrant to America on immigration to America.... There were Dennehy hallmarks throughout – scintillating textures and electric tension – as well as an impressive diversity of mood across the work’s seven movements. The performance was extraordinary, with Andres and Kaplan bringing some effects I’ve rarely seen, like the high-wire acrobatics as the sixth movement bounced between hands, registers and pianos, or both pianists’ ability to perform rapidly repeated notes in the fifth movement, sounding not so much like Martha Argerich’s machine-gun technique as a harp’s bisbigliando.

Read review in full here.