Una Hunt:irishmusicmail

FALLEN LEAVES~~RTÉ Lyric FM is delighted to release a second CD from Una Hunt on its label that is committed to reawakening interest in neglected Irish composers. Fallen Leaves from an Irish Piano Album is not about forgotten curiosities, instead it gathers together for the first time the many strands of successful piano writing by nineteenth-century Irish composers. Some of these composers you will know already - Field, Esposito and Wallace for example are all here - but others are just waiting to be rediscovered. The music on Fallen Leaves from an Irish Piano Album is drawn largely from the National Archive of Irish Composers at the National Library of Ireland and is a joint venture by the Library and Lyric. Early composers like Thomas Augustine Geary, Philip Cogan, Francis Panormo and Patrick Moran were mostly resident in Ireland, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century many musicians left to seek opportunities in England or continental Europe and as a consequence, their music was published more often elsewhere. From the early part of the nineteenth century comes John Field, the most recognisable name of the pianist-composer generation. However, two other younger contemporaries, George Alexander Osborne and William Vincent Wallace also achieved prominent positions and all three were successful composers of popular piano music. Arthur O'Leary soon followed with his gently descriptive pieces and his student Charles Villiers Stanford was a prolific writer for the piano and a major force in the renaissance of English music at the end of the century. The Italian pianist Michele Esposito came to Ireland as professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and became the most important educational force in Irish pianism.~FALLEN LEAVES|LYRICCD109|~11931~11937~FALLEN LEAVES~

Una Hughes