Rhapsodic Celli: The Music of Frank Corcoran
CD Release June 2017 – Available for Review Now
Rhapsodic Celli will be launched at The Hugh Lane Gallery Sundays@Noon concert, Parnell Square North, Dublin 1 on 4th June.
Soloist Martin Johnson explores Frank Corcoran’s writing for cello in all its nuances, from the swagger of a concerto and the rhapsodic polyphony of his work for eight cellos through to the composer’s arrangements of folk tunes for cello and piano informed by the rhythms of the Irish language.
Frank Corcoran has lived and taught in Germany for most of his professional life but has retained a profound connection with the literature and traditional music of his native country. The CD features his Cello Concerto, a rhapsody for cello octet and eight miniatures based on traditional tunes for cello and piano.
Corcoran’s Duetti Irlandesi for Cello and Piano pay homage to a distant musical ancestor, the master harper Floirint Ó Corcorain. These traditional melodies would originally have been played on the Irish harp and the Composer says, “…have been haunting me since my rural childhood in Tipperary. I had long been appalled by the settings of old Irish melodies attempted by Beethoven, Haydn, Britten, Harty and too many other well-meaning composers: their often saccharine harmonies, their rhythmic iron corsets or indeed the foursquare form too often adopted.” Instead, Corcoran has incorporated the freer sean nós or old-style singing rhythms and grace notes into his classically informed settings of these tunes so they become “… historical miniatures of my vanished Ireland.