IMMA, Dublin

Osvaldo Golijov– How slow the wind; Lúa descolorida.

Donnacha Dennehy– Grá agus Bás.

John Zorn– Paran.

Donnacha Dennehy– That the night come.

Since her 1992 million-selling Nonesuch recording of Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, American soprano Dawn Upshaw has lent her warm, unfussy and intelligent voice to numerous collaborations with living composers who have written for her, such as John Harbison, John Adams and Kaija Saariaho.

Joining them on Saturday night was Dublin's Donnacha Dennehy who wrote That the night come– settings for voice and ensemble of six Yeats poems – for Upshaw. The simple tenderness and flexibility of her singing ideally matched some of the most direct music ever to come from Dennehy who professed to share Yeats's "obsessions" with unattainable love, fleeting happiness and death.

It’s Dennehy in a different mood, certainly from what I’m used to: more inward and reflective, less urban, less muscular.

There is an overarching, unifying preoccupation with blended timbres and colours and with spectral delicacy, sometimes to breathtaking effect as in the serene loveliness of He wishes his beloved were dead. There's even a programmatic water-motif on the piano in The old men admiring themselves in the water,while Her anxietyparadoxically combines gentle sounds with hard sentiment.

Composers since Haydn have been borrowing Irish songs and poetry for inspiration or exotic effect or commercial gain.

Dennehy’s Yeats settings just feel like music from someone who has happened to stumble on great lines that resonate with his own life.

This maybe makes it Irish music of exceptional authenticity, passing- out Dennehy's own Grá agus Bás(Love and Death), despite its many slowly revealed and intricate secrets, and the earthy compulsion of Iarla Ó Lionáird's sean nós singing.

Here, and in pieces by Osvaldo Golijov and John Zorn, the Crash Ensemble – strings, winds, brass, percussion and keyboard – and conductor Alan Pierson delivered intense and engaging performances.