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

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

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A weekend of Irish debuts, collaborations and musical meetings.

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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.

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Performed by Crash Ensemble.

Crash Ensemble are Ensemble in residence at the National Concert Hall.

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

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