On April 5, Ficino Ensemble and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean will premiere a new song cycle by Donnacha Dennehy at New Music Dublin. Titled Agency, the cycle is scored for voice and sinfonietta and commissioned by Ficino.
Over the course of eight movements, Dennehy draws on texts by Aristotle, Yeats, Pascal, and Emily Brönte to investigate the long history of our preoccupations with the limits of our power to steer ourselves and the world. As Dennehy observes, we “often think of our conceptualization of ‘agency’ as a relatively new phenomenon. It certainly has the whiff of a buzzword. But this question of agency has been bothering us forever, along with the limits on it imposed by pre-existing systems and other constraints outside our control […].” This deep philosophical introspection is brought to vivid life by Dennehy’s “thrilling” sonic energy and Betts-Dean’s “irrepressible sense of drama and unmissable, urgent musicality” (The Guardian).
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