McDonnell - Kraina: Songs of the Polish Diaspora

Anselm McDonnell - Kraina: Songs of the Polish Diaspora

Frédéric Chopin - Polish Songs

Jonathan Nangle - Snáth

Anselm McDonnell - Kraina

Karol Szymanowski - Songs of a fairytale princess

Rebecca Murphy, Cathal Masterson

Harty Room, Queen's University Belfast - 27th March 2026

The experience of the immigrant and the asylum seeker is one that we are all acutely aware of in the present day and the question of how to deal with further global upheavals caused by war, climate change, growing economic inequalities, rampant capitalism and depletion of the earth's resources is becoming more pressing every day. Everyone thinks they understand the implications and the challenges it presents, but for those who have to experience displacement on a personal and individual level, it can be harder to explain how much of an impact this has on their lives. Anselm McDonnell's song cycle Kraina - inspired by an idea by soprano Rebecca Murphy to consider the circumstances of the large Polish immigrant population in Northern Ireland - considers it in terms of a wider question of identity: how it ties to a notion of home and the impact that the loss of such a fundamental need can have in a broader, more universal context.

Presented as part of the Imagine! Festival of Ideas & Politics in Belfast, the programme built around Kraina extends that idea by bringing in other similar songs that deal with the same subject and further enrich it, showing that the idea of home, land, borders, emigration and displacement really is an experience that has been shared not only by many Polish immigrants - it is no recent EU "freedom of movement" issue - but it has also been an experience for the diaspora of many Irish people over a period of many decades and centuries. The programme therefore draws on songs by Chopin and takes us through to Szymanowski, with some new Irish language songs by Jonathan Nangle and the shared Polish-Northern Ireland experience of Anselm McDonnell's Kraina at the heart of the programme. 

Language is key to expressing the diverse issues and sentiments experienced, so the idea of it being presented in song as well as music is fundamental, as well as itself presenting something of a hinterland or border where the words and music come together. Appropriately, the selection of songs in the programme are sung in Polish, Irish and English, but music itself is an abstract form of language that uses unconventional methods of communication to put its message across, which can make it challenging to put ideas and purposes across for those unfamiliar with the language, so to speak. As well as a diversity of spoken languages, superbly enunciated and enacted by Rebecca Murphy with Cathal Masterson accompanying on the piano, the performers also had just as wide a musical language to get across.

Although not a stated aim of the programming, the side-by-side selections of Chopin, Nangel, McDonnell and Szymanowski instigated a cumulative process that not only developed the theme over the years and across musical borders, but was testament to the richness of the idea of diversity, giving the audience some unfamiliar spoken and musical languages to grapple with and consider. Alongside the beauty of the songs in their own right - despite the challenges of the spoken and musical languages (we at least had printed translations of the words) - the performance of the Rebecca Murphy with Cathal Masterson was utterly beguiling, truly inviting you to engage in the experience, bringing a genuine operatic quality to the evening in terms of breadth of the subject, personal interpretation and overall impact.

Three of Chopin's 'Polish Songs' set the scene, Smutna rzeka (Sad River), Precz z moich oczu (Out of my Sight) and Wojak (The Warrior), surely the most welcoming of introductions to the theme, each enchanting in their own way, even if the very opening words of Smutna rzeka hint at troubles ahead. ('O river from the country of strangers/Why is your course so cloudy?'). Jonathan Nangle's three songs Snáth followed and brought about a subtle change in the mood. Like Anselm McDonnell, Jonathan Nangle is a contemporary Irish composer perhaps better known for more modern electro-acoustic and video multimedia work, but the three songs composed for Snáth (Yarn) were composed in the classic lieder style part of an initiative to set Irish language texts/poems to music. They very much head into darker places - literally in the opening lines of An Croí (The Heart) which translate as "everblack blackest black then down", Snáth evoking Ariadne with a ball of yarn to "guide you through the labyrinth, tunnels of all your dark places", Chugat (Towards You) warning "don't wait for me too long". They are all beautiful concentrated little pieces where the intensity of the sentiments was vividly expressed in the precise piano accompaniment of Cathal Masterson and impressive range of Rebecca Murphy's sweet lyrical soprano.

Anselm McDonnell's Kraina song cycle consists of four pieces, which are indeed - as Rebecca Murphy described in her introduction - each like a mini-opera in their own right. They were certainly delivered that way with a beautiful expressivity where the soprano absorbed the sentiments evoked in the magical hinterland between the words and the music and 'translated' them to the audience in a performance that scarcely needed a glance at the translations to understand what was being said. That was not necessary of course for Kraina II - The House on the Interface from 'Belfast. 99 ścian pokoju' by Aleksandra Łojek as the lyrics for this song were translated for the piece by the author herself. The song directly confronts the reality of moving into a troubled area of Belfast divided by a 'peace wall', but in a way, Łojek's experience (I think she said that in the post-performance discussion that she has moved home 37 times!) reflects the dilemma expressed in the beautiful Kraina I - Jeżeli porcelana ("didn’t anyone tell you that you’ll never in the world feel at home here?"), McDonnell's treated piano arrangement providing a jagged evocation of the poem's imagery of shattered porcelain ground under the tracks of a tank. 

There is room for a little optimism in Kraina III - Kraina, but the prospect of new pleasures to be found in a new place are tempered by feelings of nostalgia for the deeper roots of the homeland ("Why does my heart forever still bewail/Far-distant lands, more distant days of old?"). It's telling that the text of this piece from 'Pielgrzym' by Adam Mickiewicz was written in 1826, showing that the experiences of the Polish diaspora stretch back centuries and face many of the same challenges today. Not least questions of language and communication as the setting of Peter Skrzynecki 1978 text for Kraina IV - The Polish Immigrant where "tooth-grinding consonants that must be phonetically rehearsed". Rounding out the programme, the choice of three of Szymanowski's 'Songs of a fairytale princess' was just perfect, from the perspective of choosing a significant 20th century Polish composer to contrast with the opening Chopin pieces, for the remarkable variety that it brought to the programme, but also for how it seemed to long for that magical place of escape to an ideal world.

External links: Imagine! Belfast

McDonnell - Politics of the Imagination

Anselm McDonnell - Politics of the Imagination

Stop Small Boats – Crash Ensemble – Leonie Bluett, Kate Ellis, Patrick Nolan – Barrowclough, Joel the Custodian, Kosyne

Politics of the Imagination – Crash Ensemble – Leonie Bluett, Kate Ellis, Patrick Nolan – Barrowclough, Joel the Custodian, Kosyne

The Union is our God – Musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra – Clare Findlater, Tom Ellis, Sam Walton, David Jackson

Cross-Purposes – Musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra – Heather Roche, Louise McMonagle

Independent label CD/Download

One of the problems for composers of contemporary classical or new music, apart from the challenges of getting new work commissioned and performed in the first place, is that it can appear difficult, abstract and academic to the outside observer, detached from the 'real world'. We are a long way away from the political engagement of the music of Luigi Nono (Intolleranza 1960), but fortunately, as seen recently in the latest edition of the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble's Ink Still Wet programme, there is a new generation of composers willing to confront and engage with the world around us and the new challenges we face today, many recognising the importance of our relationship with nature and how it is under threat, finding relevant and creative ways to explore those issues.

Whether it's concern about the climate or returning to seek solace in nature that is uppermost in many people's mind, the political and social issues raised by Luigi Nono a long time ago are unsurprisingly not all that different from similar problems we face in the world today. There is still a lot of 'intolleranza' going around. I don't think it's arguable that we might even be in a far worse place today, but a different response is required and indeed a new musical approach. What you might not be expecting from a contemporary music composer however - and to be honest, there has been little indication from this composer that he was heading in this direction - is the impact of the first track on Anselm McDonnell's third album, setting the tone for what follows; a word driven electronic beat and a rap that samples and musically elaborates on Rishi Sunak's promise to Stop Small Boats, shifting from Stockhausen into Prodigy territory. Now that's a generational shift.

You can thank Birmingham rappers Barrowclough, Joel the Custodian and Kosyne for that along with members of Ireland's ever creative music group, the Crash Ensemble, but Irish/Welsh composer Anselm McDonnell has already made ambitious steps towards extending the range of what can be explored by contemporary music, and elsewhere on the album working with the LSO, he can be seen working towards a style where there needs to be no strict demarcation or boundaries around what media and instrumentation contemporary music can make use of, nor what subjects it can deal with. The scene set with Stop Small Boats, the music genre barriers already beaten down and ready to confront the political climate of the day, those features are what characterise and what amounts to a kind of rap opera - or 'hip-hopera' - Politics of the Imagination.

There is no need to detail or even rail against everything that is wrong with the world today. In Politics of the Imagination the pertinent question posed by one of its characters is "What do you want to see changed? What's collapsing under the strain? What could be brought into public domain?". Brexit and AI are just two of the problems/solutions mentioned here, but not as merely throwaway buzzwords. These are issues that were/are supposed to bring change, but have they been or will they be for the better? And if there is any good to come of such new ways of working, who will really benefit from them? What is really needed is an imaginative response, a politics of the imagination to find a way how we can break the current failing/failed system and come up with new ideas. No, I'm not seeing much sign of that either, although there are a few crypto-fascist billionaires with some ideas of how much they can gain from breaking the system. If we can be aware of the danger and avoid that fate, that might be the best we can hope for right now.

Politics of the Imagination does just that in a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek way, but that can be a good and accessible means of getting a message across. Divided into seven sections, the piece opens with the fall-out from a local politician's press conference on his plans to fix the post-pandemic, post-Brexit problems of his constituency of Nether Whitaker, but is really just finding a way to serve his own interests? He is indeed challenged on this quite vocally by one activist, actually a former schoolmate, the two men having very different views on what needs to change. Their discussion continues in an elevator where a mysterious lift attendant takes them on a Being John Malkovich journey to floors where they have the opportunity to try out their ideals in various conceptions of utopia. Needless to say, the future doesn't look too bright (and unfortunately for us here, it does look orange).

Hip-hopera is not a new term or genre, but I don't think its potential as a means to progress musical forms and get across important contemporary ideas has yet been fully realised. The music in Politics of the Imagination does integrate fully with the hip-hop style in a creative way that still retains the flavour of its new music and experimental roots, but it does inevitably take something of a backseat to the delivery to the rap storytelling. If a rap opera sounds intimidating - a challenge new music often has to content with - it is not rap as most of us know it from furious hard driven hip-hop, grime or freestyling monologues, but a form of rap-inflected spoken-word theatre, the three vocalists fluidly interacting in their witty and creatively worded exchanges, leaving space for the situation and the ideas to be heard. The music might never dominate but it also never falls back to simple rhythmic beats and accompaniment either. It's music to explore new worlds, working purely in service of the situations and their utopian ideals, painting an auditory picture, and there is a welcome brief musical coda in the final section, The Basement, that gives pause for reflection and perhaps sums up that fewer words, less idealism and more action is needed.

But the music doesn't stop there and the subsequent final two tracks similarly find new ways in which music can engage with real political events and their consequences on the streets. The Union is our God boldly employs the marching tattoos of snare drums, the boom of the Lambeg and confrontational flute playing in a piece inspired by or a reaction to what we call the Marching Season; sounds that are deeply ingrained into the subconscious of many Northern Ireland residents. What McDonnell does however is combine an original arrangement of those traditional instruments with guitar screeches, electronic samples of noises, crashing glass and voices of protestors, ending on a violent note with with a snare hit that sounds like a gunshot. It's a superbly realised piece of music that has absorbs the celebratory nature of the music, but gains deeper resonances and is more than a little unsettling for others who might recognise in it the intimidating background sound of many Belfast summers.

I'm not sure that the behaviour and failures of the UK and world political leaders response to the COVID epidemic needs to be satirised, but consisting of a range of sampled, cut-up and reassembled pronouncements, the final piece Cross-Purposes also clashes familiar voices with sounds in a context where we can take notice of it in a new light. As such it is certainly a topic worth raising again, reminding us by letting the words and pronouncements of our politicians speak for themselves - much like Conor Mitchell and his Belfast Ensemble have done in Abomination, Riot Symphony and the cut-up news samples of Lunaria - that these actions haven't been forgotten and are still out there to be held to account in the court of public opinion. Like The Union is our God and indeed the Belfast Ensemble's work, Cross-Purposes forces you to admire the cleverness of it, take in what it is saying and still feel vaguely disturbed by it all. All good signs that Anselm McDonnell is another Northern Ireland composer on the cutting edge of musical creativity and politically charged contemporary relevance.

External links: Bandcamp, Anselm McDonnell

Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble - Ink Still Wet VIII (Belfast, 2024)

Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble - Ink Still Wet VIII

Composers: Anselm McDonnell, Fionnuala Fagan-Thiébot, Simon Mawhinney, Omar Zatriqi, Peter O'Doherty, Sam Chambers, Ian Wilson

Conductor: Benjamin Haemhouts

Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble: Aisling Agnew (flute), Sarah Watts (clarinet), David McCann (cello), Daniel Browell (piano) with guests Alex Petcu (percussion), Ciaran McCabe (violin), Ben Gannon (oboe), Lina Andonovska (flute)

Harty Room, Queen's University, Belfast - 1st February 2025

There may be some commonality in the musical backgrounds of the composers, many of them having studied at Queens University in Belfast or lectured there, but that's to be expected considering that the pieces in this programme of contemporary music are being presented - and in the case of four of the seven pieces actually commissioned - to form part of the eighth annual concert of new music performed by Northern Ireland's principal contemporary music ensemble, the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble. New music so fresh in fact that this particular annual programme goes under the title of Ink Still Wet. The backgrounds of the composers however are rather more varied than that suggests and that is reflected in the surprisingly wide variety of compositions presented in Ink Still Wet VIII.

Or perhaps not so surprising really. Aside from the permutations that you can make use of in a core ensemble of five or six musicians and a few additional guests, there are various creative and modern technologies that can be employed where appropriate in service of the demands of any given piece, and some unexpected ones too. As such, none of the pieces in the programme were remotely alike, which is a testament to the individuality and creativity of the composers and to the performers of the HRSE in adapting to those styles, but it's also a sign that new contemporary music is in a very good place at the moment - both locally and internationally - not relying on the style or technique of some of the modern titans of new music past, but seeking to find new and creative means of personal expression that speaks of the world today.

What impressed me most about all the selections is that none of the compositions presented here - well, maybe one or two of them a little - were purely 'conceptual' or technical exercises in virtuosity, but indeed many of them reflected in one form or another consideration of an newfound or revitalised appreciation for nature. The programme notes for Ink Still Wet VIII reveal that many of the pieces here found inspiration from sources in nature, and embraced the challenge of finding an artistic and creative way to express and share those impressions with an audience through music.

The first two pieces in the programme strove to do this by extending the range of traditional musical instruments by including electronic and sound effects from nature. A play on the word Ectosymbiont, that refers to a parasitic organism that attaches itself to another to form a symbiotic relationship Anselm McDonnell's 'Echosymbiont' saw the composer acting as the 'outside' force, processing some of the sounds of the live performance on computer and playing it back through an on-stage speaker as an echoing response. It was a little unsettling initially to hear pauses where Alex Petcu's percussion continued in soft fading delays of electronic reverberations, but aside from perhaps recognising that there is a symbiotic (but hopefully not parasitic) relationship between composer and performers, it also reminded me that music doesn't stop when the playing finishes. It resonates in the room and - hopefully - has made a deeper connection with the listener and perhaps stays with them even longer than that. This one certainly did. 

Fionnuala Fagan-Thiébot's 'Lisnabreeny Townland' was perhaps the piece where the connection with nature was most open and obvious without the aid of programme notes, the composer choosing to find her own form of symbiotic relationship in a solo flute composition by introducing field recordings alongside the playing of the flute. In four parts, inspired by walks to the ancient Lisnabreeny Rath in the Castlereagh Hills, the flute blended with and interacted with the sounds of birds, wind, water and leaves, even background sounds of traffic recorded on location. This was not just a pastoral piece however, but touched on mythology and fairy lore and our connection with an ancient world through nature. You could almost imagine this piece working in an outdoor setting, since it certainly achieved a sense of that even within the acoustics of the Harty Room at Queen's University. The piece resonated wonderfully with some deeply felt and sympathetic playing from Aisling Agnew. Again it emphasised how music is all around, how sounds inspire music and how music can strive not just imitate natural sounds but seek to embrace them and invite the listener to hear them in a fresh context while making something entirely new.

Simon Mawhinney perhaps stretched the definition of 'ink still wet' with his piece 'In Blue and Gold', taking a youthful student composition from 1998 and developing it into something new in 2024. If there is a connection to nature here it is at a remove, taking initial inspiration from another artistic work itself based on nature - a Middle Eastern painting 'Nocturne in Blue and Gold' by Walter Greaves, (which in itself were inspired by Whistler's paintings of the Thames in the same style) - which makes it an intriguing proposition when the composer is himself working at a remove and with maturity and experience in response to his younger nature and ideas. And it very much proves to be, the expansion of the instrumentation for a seven piece ensemble requiring the addition of guest oboist Ben Gannon with the HRSE delivering the wonderful richness and fullness of sound of the newly developed piece.

Belfast-born Omar Zatriqi's 'Diatribe' also proved to have a deep connection to exploring personal roots and influences, drawing from the composer's Albanian, Scottish and Croatian heritage. Although it incorporated folk influences from each of these worlds across each of its three sections and coda, there was no evident referencing of old style music in this thoroughly modern and contemporary piece composed for six piece ensemble. That in itself is a testament to acceptance of the gift of diversity and musically processing that mixed heritage into something new. If anything there was an sense of jazz fusion as much as folk in the bringing together of those influences to derive something of a distinct contemporary and personal voice. Different instruments would come into focus in each section, taking a lead and responding to each other, with the piano and marimba acting as a kind of connecting tissue. Each section seemed to build to a head only to be punctuated by crashes to release the build up of tension created by the overwhelming weight of bearing such rich and diverse ideas.

Perhaps it was just a lack of focus on my part after the interval, but Peter O'Doherty's 'Inflorescence' flew over my head and I was unable to find a way into it on a single hearing. It seeks to replicate in its structure the cluster patterns of flowers on a plant, the whole ecosystem of growth, flowering, decay and renewal. I love the idea of taking inspiration from structures in nature but it inevitably makes it a very complex piece with interweaving clusters, creating textures and resonances on adjoining sections and instrumentation. I would like to hear this again to see if I could get my head around it.

While understandably some of the commissioned works take advantage of the full resources of the musicians of the HRSE, there is also the freedom to choose to avail of just one of its soloists. Sam Chambers' 'His Feet are Light and Nimble' for solo violin certainly put guest violinist Ciaran McCabe through his paces, the piece feeling like it lay somewhere between a jig and demonic possession. It's not a long piece but such was the drive and delivery that you almost feared that McCabe was operating under a spell or a curse, and that if he stopped he would drop down dead in the spot. Fortunately that did not happen, but such are the fanciful ideas that come to mind while listening to the thrilling performance of this piece. Perhaps not so fanciful really since the piece is indeed inspired by just such a satanically possessed performance by a character in Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian.

While trying to navigate my way through a new piece of music heard for the first time, I often look for focus on an instrument that leads the way through it. There was no such difficulty with Sam Chambers' piece and definitely no mistaking that the focus of attention in Ian Wilson's 'When I Became the Sun' was on the rivetting performance of guest flautist Lina Andonovska, for whom the piece was written. Again the concept determined to a certain degree the choice of instrument - another ambitious engagement with nature on a grand scale, perhaps the most important one of all - but there was no failing to recognise the dominance of the role of the flute in the piece or the virtuosity of the performance. Becoming the sun, Andonovska's playing was a stellar force of nature, and if the rest of the ensemble at times felt like they were merely responsive to its force and whims, they were nonetheless vital components in the piece and in the overall fabric of the concept.

Suitably rich in its instrumentation, the piece therefore had a coherence but also an unpredictability in how a response to those emanations could take many forms. Sometimes it manifested as playful ripples of percussion and piano keys, sometimes inviting a concerted rhythmic pulsation from the ensemble, slipping into a melodic bliss or a chaotic breakdown, in the process of course inviting an individual response within the listener. One other quite original element that introduced a hard to define character to the composition was the threading of motifs and indeed riffs, from heavy rock band System of a Down's 'Toxicity' throughout the composition. The title of the composition indeed comes from the last line of the song 'When I became the sun I shone life into the man's hearts'. It served perhaps as the human counterpart to the flute's sun and the ensemble's Earth responsiveness, but certainly brought additional dynamism to the conceptual and musical flavour of the piece.

External links: Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble