Dennehy: The First Child Irish National Opera Chorus, Crash Ensemble & Ryan McAdams

• Donnacha Dennehy (b. 1970): THE FIRST CHILD:
• 1 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: An Opera. Beginning 01:39
• 2 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Ignored by time 03:11
• 3 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: So, this is your first child, how exciting 04:29
• 4 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: The woman I was yesterday has been changed 01:12
• 5 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Room 02:11
• 6 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: I'm sheltering from the rain 04:19
• 7 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: When you find the right person 02:23
• 8 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: If bottles aren't sterilised properly 03:13
• 9 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Does the light forget ever 02:32
• 10 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Karen checks out Simon on Instagram 01:30
• 11 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: I saw you in the yard this morning 01:23
• 12 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Only last week I was saying to the boys 04:26
• 13 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Could the moon decide to leave me there 06:28
• 14 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: And you said 01:50
• 15 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Dance 05:23
• 16 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Do you live around here 06:21
• 17 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: From this day a line is drawn 03:18
• 18 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Well over our weekly consumption of alcohol 04:08
• 19 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: From where I'm standing 03:15
• 20 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Will you see him again 06:46
• 21 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: In their bed within their room 08:49
• 22 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: Could the moon have decided 06:44
• 23 Dennehy: THE FIRST CHILD: The story is beginning again... 03:32
• Total Runtime 01:29:02

Info for Dennehy: The First Child

Irish National Opera and Landmark Productions are proud to announce the forthcoming release the final opera in the trilogy by composer Donnacha Dennehy and writer Enda Walsh as a digital release with Signum Records. This new digital album is the fourth release in the partnership between Irish National Opera and Signum Records, including most recently the Grammy nominated Trade / Mary Motorhead.

The First Child continues the ground-breaking exploration of multi-media and cross-artform disciplines that have been the hallmark of Walsh and Dennehy’s collaboration. Their trademark suburban gothic style combines the ultra-slick with the disturbingly dystopian. The music and drama create a visceral and highly theatrical world. A cast of five singers, two actors and a haunting children’s choir come together with Crash Ensemble to imagine a terrifying story of lost innocence—a baby on a beach—and the sea.

The opera was premiered as part of Dublin Theatre Festival in 2021 in a co-production with Landmark Productions and the album was recorded at the Cork Opera House in September 2022. The recording producer was René Möller, the Balance Engineer was Wolfgang Schiefermair with Editing and Mix by René Möller at Teldex Studio Berlin.

Composer Note: The First Child is the last opera in my trilogy with Enda Walsh. It feels to me to be the most intense of the three, powered along by a kind of tidal energy. And yet within that, I’m forever seeking the melody in these broken characters. In some way, the opera is about the impact that circular forces can have on our life and on nature. Though it has a dystopian looping structure to it ultimately, there is also a kind of catharsis unleashed by the power of the music. I should let you know that three of the players within Crash Ensemble also double up as microtonal pianists, playing notes between the equal tempered scale. Quite often these relate to the overtone series, but at other times they present strange doppelgangers of their equal-tempered equivalents. The bulk of the opera was written during the pandemic, and one can almost feel the music yearning and bursting to break the banks set up around it. Writing this opera was probably the most intense creative experience of my life so far. — Donnacha Dennehy

“exquisitely tunes our emotional register to the damage of childhood trauma . . . a powerful and compelling excursion into the sinister side of suburban life” - THE SUNDAY TIMES

"a remarkable conclusion to the Dennehy-Walsh partnership" - The Irish Times

Sarah Shine, soprano (Karen)
Niamh O’Sullivan, mezzo soprano (Alva)
Dean Power, tenor (Gary)
Emmett O’Hanlon, baritone (Simon)
Eric Jurenas, countertenor (Nurse)
Irish National Opera Chorus
Crash Ensemble
Ryan McAdams, conductor

Crash Ensemble
A group of world-class musicians who play the most adventurous, ground-breaking music of today. ‍

Amazingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things - Crash are innovative, adventurous and ambitious.

Led by our cellist and Artistic Director, Kate Ellis and Principal Conductor, Ryan McAdams, we commission, collaborate, explore, investigate and experiment with a broad spectrum of music creators and artistic collaborators. We love to innovate, with quality always at the heart of everything we do.

Crash Ensemble was founded in 1997 by composer Donnacha Dennehy, conductor and pianist Andrew Synnott, and clarinettist Michael Seaver. Donnacha Dennehy is Crash Artistic Partner.

Crash made an immediate and lasting impact on the Irish arts and cultural landscape, with some of the most distinctive living composers writing for the group; Terry Riley, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Donnacha Dennehy, Louis Andriessen, Jennifer Walshe, Arnold Dreyblatt, Kevin Volans, Ann Cleare, Glen Branca, Nico Muhly, Linda Buckley and Gerald Barry.

As well as performing throughout Ireland, Crash regularly perform internationally, with appearances in the last few years at Tampere Biennale (Finland), The Edinburgh International Festival (UK), The Royal Opera House (London), The Barbican (London), Carnegie Hall (NYC) The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington DC), Virginia Tech (Virginia), GAIDA Festival (Lithuania) and residencies at The Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival (UK) and Princeton University (NJ).

Ryan McAdams
Crash Ensemble named Ryan their Principal Conductor following their performances together at New Music Dublin 2020. Ryan conducted the premiere of Donnacha Dennehy's opera The Second Violinist in Ireland before taking the production to the Barbican in London and would have returned to the work again at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in autumn 2020 had circumstances permitted. The First Child, the last opera in the Donnacha Dennehy/ Enda Walsh trilogy, is currently touring Ireland (2022). Ryan studied at the Juilliard School, Indiana University, and as a Conducting Fellow at Tanglewood. The post of Apprentice Conductor at Lorin Maazel ́s Chateauville Foundation was created for him, and he served as the Assistant Conductor of the Aspen Music Festival. A Fulbright scholar, he served as Apprentice Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, assisting then-Chief Conductor Alan Gilbert. He is the first-ever recipient of the Sir Georg Solti Emerging Conductor Award (now known as the Solti Conducting Award) and the Aspen-Glimmerglass Prize for Opera Conducting.When Ryan is not travelling, he lives in Brighton with his wife, the dancer and theatre artist Laura Careless, and their son Owain, while maintaining a close connection to New York's Hudson Valley where they spent the last couple of years.

Booklet for Dennehy: The First Child