Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin Songs by Seóirse Bodley
Seamus Heaney was in the audience for this first performance of a new, substantial cycle of settings of his poems –
The Hiding Places of Love
– by the Irish composer Seóirse Bodley.
The cycle was commissioned, with funds from the Arts Council, by soprano Sylvia O'Brien who then gave the premiere, partnered on the piano by the composer. Bodley chose nine poems from two collections, The Spirit Level(1996) and District and Circle(2006).
Although there is a variety of pace and mood in Heaney’s poems, Bodley more or less sustains the one atmosphere throughout: quiet, warm, hopeful, thoughtful. He is less melodic than lyrical, and he is often dissonant and asymmetrical, but always gentle.
At times he picks out and plays with a detail – for example hinting at birdsong in two poems referring to blackbirds – while at others, for instance in The Strandand The Walk, what the composer is adding is rather more mysterious, or perhaps just private.
Although on this occasion Sylvia O’Brien, unusually tended to approach notes from below, the strength of her range at both ends and her habitual knack for softening the edges and leaps of this style, gave Heaney’s poems and Bodley’s settings a credible and often very persuasive debut.
Impressive in a different way was Bodley's inclusion of three songs he wrote in 1969 ( Ariel's Songs). Although they speak with a voice recognisable as the one in the new songs, they reflect with his early interest in various 1960s-era techniques. Much of composition has since moved on from then. And yet here was a good illustration – given one composer's evident pride in unearthing and standing over pieces from 40 years earlier, and given how well they work as songs – of how those techniques still have much to say.
