ABOUT

Dreams of One / All is a majestic vision of musical experience featuring artistic dreams from all over the world which imagine and reimagine the relationship of a single instrument — from amplified bubble-wrap to the "Hardanger D'amore" fiddle — with the many-voiced force of a large ensemble. Featuring three premieres by composers Donnacha Dennehy, Tonia Ko, and Dan Trueman, Dreams of One / All offers a far-reaching landscape of new music for the 23-member ensemble Contemporaneous with soloists Eliza McCarthy (piano), Tonia Ko (amplified bubble-wrap), and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh ("hardanger d'amore" 10-string fiddle). The culminations of many years of collaboration, each of these pieces offer a world-expanding and beautiful new imagination of what a "concerto" can be — that musical and community gathering place where the individual meets the collective.

Composer Tonia Ko’s new concerto for bubble wrap will feature Ko herself as soloist, performing on amplified bubble-wrap with Contemporaneous. Ko has carefully developed musical techniques which use bubble-wrap as an amplified instrument, and this new work will offer an exciting opportunity to experience this uniquely innovative and brilliant creative process on a large scale. Ko’s new work, which will be premiered on this concert, was recently awarded the Koussevitsky Commissioning Award from the Library of Congress.

Composer Dan Trueman and legendary Irish fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (known best for his work in the band The Gloaming) have collaboratively created a new work for Ó Raghallaigh to perform as soloist with Contemporaneous. This landmark new work brings Irish traditional music into dialogue with new orchestral composition, offering a profoundly fertile exploration of folk music in new contexts, and providing an opportunity for both of these remarkable artists to explore new ways of creating music.

Lastly, Contemporaneous will present the world premiere of Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy’s new piano concerto, a co-commission with the Crash Ensemble and the London Contemporary Orchestra, bringing this incredible new work to life for the first time in the United States with the soloist Eliza McCarthy, for whom the piece was written. Drawing on Dennehy’s startling, powerful, and intense recent work, this new concerto follows his wild musical imagination to unforgettable ends.