Darragh Morgan - Gerald Barry: In the Asylum (2022)

This album collects works for piano through piano quartet by Irish composer Gerald Barry. All, except for In the Asylum are first recordings.

Barry has had a long association with Darragh Morgan and for years both have wanted to record these works with the Fidelio Trio.

The music moves from the 1979 Rothko inspired Ø for piano quartet to the longest piece on the album, 1998, for violin and piano. Ø is as severely contained as 1998 is explosive.

In general the music is more concerned with pure material than color, and so may be played on any instruments.

The solo piano piece All day at home busy with my own affairs appears calmly at one with being alone, but is also used frenziedly in Barry’s opera Salome. All is not quiet on the home front.

There is the hallucinogenic piano trio, In The Asylum, the Le Vieux Sourd setting of Auld Lang Syne which would work perfectly on pub/bar pianos, Midday for violin and piano, a meditation on landscape, the melancholy Baroness von Ritkart, and the testicular whirlwind of Triorchic Blues.

Composer supervised performances by the Fidelio Trio (Darragh Morgan, Mary Dullea and Adi Tal) with guest artists Gerald Barry (piano on All day at home busy with my own affairs) and joined by Rose Redgrave (viola on Ø).