Gerald Barry: In the Asylum

Album review

Gerald Barry was born in Ireland in 1952. His operas have been staged at Covent Garden, Berliner Festwochen, Lincoln Center, Théâtre de L’Athenée Paris, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia and many others. His most recent work, From The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant for Double Bass and Orchestra, was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic in June 2022. His new opera, Salome, will be premiered in 2024.

This album collects works for piano through piano quartet by Irish composer Gerald Barry. All, except for In the Asylum are first recordings. Barry has had a long association with Darragh Morgan and for years both have wanted to record these works with the Fidelio Trio.

The music moves from the 1979 Rothko inspired Ø for piano quartet to the longest piece on the album, 1998, for violin and piano. Ø is as severely contained as 1998 is explosive.

In general the music is more concerned with pure material than color, and so may be played on any instruments. The solo piano piece All day at home busy with my own affairs appears calmly at one with being alone, but is also used frenziedly in Barry’s opera Salome. All is not quiet on the home front. There is the hallucinogenic piano trio, In The Asylum, the Le Vieux sourd setting of Auld Lang Syne which would work perfectly on pub/bar pianos, Midday for violin and piano, a meditation on landscape, the melancholy Baroness von Ritkart, and the testicular whirlwind of Triorchic Blues. © Mode Records