Wexford Festival: New Dublin Voices

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Wexford 27/10/25

New Dublin Voices;  Bernie Sherlock  (conductor)

 This penultimate report from this year’s Wexford Festival covers a choral concert given by Irish a cappella chamber choir  New Dublin Voices, conducted by Bernie Sherlock, on the afternoon of 27th October in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Rowe Street.  This was my first time at the venue and the warmth of its acoustic matches that of its welcome.  The choir is known for innovative programming of wide ranging repertoire, from medieval to contemporary and including commissioned and traditional music alongside core art music repertoire.  Much of the programme was sung from memory; where not, all singers had tablets.  Bernie conducted from a tablet throughout.  The pieces were engagingly and informatively introduced by choir members.

The concert was subtitled ‘The Wee Wee Man’, the first of 5 items that explored the ‘Myths and Legends’ theme of this year’s Festival.  Danish composer Vagn Holmboe’s whimsical take on the Scottish legend of a tiny man who flings ‘a meikle stane as far as I could see’ was sung in broad Scots (with flawless pronunciation, I might add).  Sprightly and rhythmic, the crisp narrative delivery was enhanced with body language and gestures, with even some hilarious bagpipe emulation.  Next up, Caroline Shaw’s ‘and the swallow’ took words from Psalm 84 expressing a longing to get closer to God, and expressed this with lovely rising tendrils of humming over restless choral chording (evoking the sound of autumn rain, I seem to recall reading), finally conveying a sense of calm and rightness with pentatonic simplicity, searching ‘ahhs’ completing the picture.  Before singing the Shaw (and between numbers throughout), the singers rearranged themselves to a disposition that better matched the ensemble writing of the piece (in this case antiphonal), reminding me immediately of the London-based chamber choir Tenebrae, a comparison from which New Dublin Voices have nothing to fear (au contraire).  In fact, having previously heard the Shaw performed by both NYCoS Chamber Choir and Tenebrae, New Dublin Voices come out on top in my estimation.  Two senses of ‘Latin’ converged in German choral conductor Georg Grün’s ‘Veni! (Maranatha No.3), with devotional text in the ancient language married to the hemiolic metres of Hispanic dance music, and a slower common time canonical central section, a first hearing of a gorgeous piece. 

Two imaginative commissioned settings of Yeats followed, the first conducted by choir member and Assistant Conductor Brian Dungan.  Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi’s take on ‘The Stolen Child’ (abducted by the faeries) is a lovely setting, its irregular metre evocative of the Sligo landscape and the entreating faeries. (As an aside: I recall, as a 9-year-old, leaving the National Gallery in Dublin after a chamber music concert on a dark wet slippery night, my father taking my hand and quoting “Come away,  O human child! To the waters and the wild   With a faery, hand in hand,  For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand” – and us getting the funniest looks from a security guard.  True story.)  Less mythological but just as rooted in place and nature was Irish composer Jonathan Nangle’s ‘O Curlew’, from the short poem ‘He Reproves The Curlew’, the poet begging the curlew to cease its song, which only intensifies the pain of lost love.  There is also an extra, environmental element to the lament – the curlew is now on the endangered species red list and its song is in actual peril of vanishing permanently from Ireland’s wild wetlands.  A smaller group stood apart singing gently rocking chords as the plaintive lament was sung by the main body of the choir.  At the end, an extraordinary emulation of the song of the birds transported the listener to the wild places.  As magical as it was poignant.

Three pieces then shifted the theme to war and conflict, the first of them still clinging to myths to some extent.  Ravel’s ‘Trois Chansons’ are settings of his own poems about lost innocence, dating from 1914, when he made multiple attempts to enlist but was being repeatedly rejected.  ‘Nicolette’ is a Red Riding Hood-type figure, a young girl picking flowers on a meadow escapes a wolf and a page, but loses her innocence to an ugly older gentleman offering gold.: sweet music alternating with menacing.  In ‘Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis’, a girl seeking news of her beloved from the front receives 3 gifts of birds in the patriotic colours of the tricolore, and realises he is among the fallen.  Solos from each section float over vocable harmonies that could have come from ‘Ma mère l'Oye’ or ‘Tombeau de Couperin’.  Subtly chilling and lovely at the same time.  ‘Ronde’ is a rapid patter song with irregular metre listing mythological bogey-men and monsters that we don’t believe in any more because we’re grown up.  Or do we?  A fabulous hoot.  By contrast, American composer Joan Szymko’s ‘Nothing But Mud’ is another commission, a bleak setting of a grim poem by Stillorgan-born Sir William Orpen, official British government war artist of the First World War, ‘The Church, Zillebeke, October 1918’, a graphic description of the conditions at the front in Passchendaele.  (Another aside: Irish broadcaster and women’s rights activist, later a producer, Hilary Orpen, a direct descendant of Sir William, lived across the road from me in the mid-1970s and I used to babysit her two sons.  Later Tristan Lynch became a film producer and Adam Lynch became a film composer.)  The last war-related piece was composed by a member of the choir, Seán Doherty.  ‘Snow Dance for the Dead’, evoking a brutal period of Russian history, the Civil War which followed the Revolution, where murder squads of the forerunner of the KGB, the Cheka, eliminated anybody suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies.  Music depicting children obliviously dancing in the snow is overlaid with onomatopoeic depictions of gunfire, as sections of the choir raise their hands as if to shoot a firearm and shout the sounds.  It was powerful, terrifying and unforgettable.  Seán came forward to acknowledge the enthusiastic, if stunned, applause.

Two Irish traditional songs followed, both familiar to me since primary school.  ‘An Poc ar Buile’ (The Puck on a Rampage) is ostensibly about a puck goat leaving a trail of insult, injury and destruction, foiling all attempts at containment by persons of authority and dignity.  The quasi-recitative verses and the riotous choruses were sung straight and unharmonised, as if in a pub, which is how it should be.  Grand.  ‘Buachaill ón Éirne’ (A Boy from the Erne – the river and lake district of Co. Fermanagh) is the proposal of a self-styled “eligible bachelor”, whose ironic desirability becomes progressively more tarnished with the revelations of the later verses contradicting the boastful first.  It was sung in an arrangement by local Wexford man Cyril Murphy, with quite a free introduction and many impressionistic key changes.  Cyril was in the audience and came forward to acknowledge the applause.

Next came another Mäntyjärvi setting, this one of a poem by 19th century Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, ‘Die Stimme des Kindes’ (The Voice of the Child), in which the poet watches a sleeping child and imagines their world view, now and in the future.  What felt like a steady 6/8 pulse underlay shifting colours and shadows, with the illusion of ‘found’ harmonies in the flow.  A very lovely piece.  Lithuanian composer Vytautas Miškinis’ 8-part ‘Dum medium silentium’, fusing ancient Gregorian chant with Lithuanian folk music influences, was equally atmospheric and featured polymetric and polyrhythmic lines, slowly declamatory on mantra words like ‘domine’ coincident with fast on words like ‘omnipotens’, gelling to homophony.  Tonal, approachable and immensely satisfying, it was extremely well sung and very well received.  I’ve heard it only once before, from the huge RSNO Chorus under Stephen Doughty.  It works at least as well with a chamber choir.  The programme concluded with one final traditional Irish song (also familiar from my primary school days and, indeed, from when my cousins used to visit and all the kids had to do ‘a turn’ – my cousin Eileen used to sing it): ‘Beidh Aonach Amárach’ (There’s a Fair Tomorrow).  A young girl begs her mother to be allowed to go to the fair, where she will tryst with her crush, a shoemaker.  Of course, mum says no.  Each verse, daughter pester-power repeats a plea 3 times before single-line definitive maternal refusal.  The punchline: “Maybe in a few years; you’re only 9 years old”.  A beautiful arrangement by former member of the choir Eoghan Conway, sung with characterful expression, gestures and body language.  Excellent.

There was an encore, a smooth bluesy jazz rendition of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s 1964 classic ‘Feeling Good’ (often called ‘It’s a new dawn; it’s a new day’).  Cool.