Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble: Pierrot Lunaire

Featuring Aoife Miskelly (soprano) and Malachy Frame (baritone).

HomePlace is delighted to welcome Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble to The Helicon in their tenth anniversary year to perform three works celebrating poetry and music.

The Ensemble pays tribute to English composer Harrison Birtwistle who passed away in April 2022. Birtwistle is best known for his opera output, but Bogenstrich is a more intimate song cycle based on texts by Rilke, which demonstrates his capacity to create truly beautiful chamber music.

Greg Caffrey’s Death of a Naturalist, based on poems by Seamus Heaney, began life as a song cycle for piano and baritone and was performed at HomePlace in 2020. It is performed here in a special arrangement written for the Hard Rain wind and string players and baritone voice in celebration of the ensemble’s 10th anniversary season.

_Pierrot Lunaire _needs little introduction. It is a melodrama setting of 21 poems by Albert Giraud. Considered a masterpiece of chamber music repertoire, it was written, unusually, for a ‘reciter’, and is commonly performed by a soprano. The group of instruments for which the piece was written has now become a standard combination in the 21st Century and the Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble is an exemplary example of the ‘Pierrot Ensemble’ sound.