Raymond Deane [b. 1953]
String Quartet No.7 [2021-2022]

Performed by the ConTempo Quartet
Triskel Christchurch, Cork, 14th September 2024

For many composers the two years of Covid-19 restrictions beginning in March 2020 were a source of frustration, even depression. For me they were an inspiration: in the absence of performances or commissions, composition again became the stuff of daily life; the series of chamber and choral works I produced during those months had a spontaneity I had forgotten was possible. String Quartet VII (2021–2022) brought this series to a close. It is a short single movement broken into many episodes: perhaps a kind of rondo with several ideas competing for the status of “main subject”. Towards the end there is a brief quotation from Beethoven's 26th Piano Sonata, Les adieux. With hindsight, I think I was bidding farewell ("lebewohl") to lockdown.

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Raymond Deane was born in Co Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, on 27 January 1953. From 1963 he lived in Dublin, where he studied at University College Dublin, graduating in 1974. He was a founding member of the Association of Young Irish Composers and won numerous awards as a pianist. He subsequently studied in Basle with Gerald Bennett, in Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in Berlin with Isang Yun.

He was featured composer in the 1991 Accents Festival (with Kurtag) and the 1999 Sligo New Music Festival (with Roger Doyle). He has featured in several ISCM festivals (Mexico City, Manchester, Hong Kong), in the festivals l'Imaginaire Irlandais (Paris 1996), Voyages (Montreal 2002), Warsaw Autumn (2004), and regularly in the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers (his Ripieno for orchestra winning a special prize in 2000).

His works have been commissioned by RTÉ (for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and the RTÉ Contempo String Quartet), the Irish Chamber Orchestra (three times), the Vanbrugh String Quartet, the Callino String Quartet, the Arditti String Quartet, the Schubert Ensemble of London, bass-clarinettist Harry Sparnaay, pianist Hugh Tinney (twice), the Danish Nordlys Ensemble and others. His chamber operas The Poet and his Double and The Wall of Cloud were commissioned by Opera Theatre Company. His full-scale opera The Alma Fetish was given its concert premiere by Wide Open Opera in Dublin in 2013. The chamber opera Vagabones, with a libretto by Renate Debrun based on a play by Emma Donoghue, was commissioned by Opera Collective Ireland who toured Ireland with it in 2019.