Perspectives: The Cruellest Month - Crash Ensemble: Cashel Day-Lewis & Bryce Dessner Chamber Music

Cashel Day-Lewis Missing Ballybough (New Commission) 
Bryce Dessner Murder Ballades

Performed by Crash Ensemble

A weekend of Irish debuts, collaborations and musical meetings.

Cashel Day-Lewis is a composer and violinist steeped in both traditional Irish and Baroque music. Their inspiration is primarily drawn from their background in traditional Irish music, time spent living in Ireland, and historically informed performance. Both musical traditions inform Day-Lewis’ compositional style.

Day-Lewis’s music “[combines] a sense of Baroque embellishment and form with polytonal exploration,” (The Washington Classical Review) and has been performed by the New York Philharmonic (Frayhayt for full orchestra, 2019), as well as by Helena Baillie (Thief at the Banquet for solo violin, 2024). Recent and upcoming projects include a suite for solo viola da gamba (Five Ghost Portraits, 2023–24) and an orchestral fanfare commissioned for the celebration of the 2024 Lorain County bicentennial, as well as a commission from harpsichordist Lillian Gordis to be recorded for an upcoming album in 2026.

Bryce Dessner is a vital and rare force in new music. He has won Grammy Awards as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger, and co-principal songwriter. He is regularly commissioned to write for the world’s leading ensembles, from Orchestre de Paris to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonic, and is a high-profile presence in film score composition, with credits including The Revenant, for which he was Grammy and Golden Globe nominated, Fernando Mereilles’s The Two Popes, Mike Mill’s C’mon C’mon, Bardo, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me, and Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo.

Crash Ensemble is Ireland’s leading new music ensemble; a group of world-class musicians who play the most adventurous, groundbreaking music of today. Led by cellist and Artistic Director, Kate Ellis and Principal Conductor, Ryan McAdams, the ensemble commissions, explores, investigates and experiments with a broad spectrum of music creators and artistic collaborators. 

Many well-known artists from diverse musical backgrounds have performed with the ensemble, including Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson, Lisa Hannigan, Íarla Ó Lionáird (The Gloaming), Bryce Dessner (The National), Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), Sam Amidon, and Beth Orton. As well as performing throughout Ireland, Crash regularly performs internationally, with appearances in the last few years at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Royal Opera House, the Barbican, Carnegie Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Virginia Tech, GAIDA Festival and residencies at The Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival and Princeton University.

This weekend sees NCH debuts from the acclaimed French singer-songwriter Mina Tindle and Quatuor Zaïde, the return of the much-loved Sam Amidon and Kate Stables with Bryce Dessner (The National) and Benjamin Lanz contributing. Thomas Bartlett and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh of The Gloaming reconvene their sublime duo. 

Curated by Sounds from a Safe Harbour and Brassland with NCH.