Jane O'Leary [b.1946]
Mystic Play of Shadows [1995]

Performed by the Banbha Quartet
Abbey Presbyterian Church, Dublin, 8th March 2026

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Jane O’Leary became resident in Ireland in 1972, making her home in Galway. A founding member of Aosdána, she is a graduate of Vassar College and holds a PhD in composition from Princeton University. She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music Degree by the National University of Ireland in 2007. In 2025 she was awarded a National Concert Hall Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to the musical life of Ireland. As artistic director and pianist of Concorde, Ireland’s first new music ensemble, Jane has been deeply committed to connecting performers, composers and listeners since the group was founded in 1976.

Her music has been performed at prestigious international festivals and venues, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in addition to festivals in Italy, Brazil, and Spain, and at venues across Ireland. CDs of her chamber and orchestral music were released on Navona Records label in 2017 and 2021 and a portrait concert featuring her music for clarinet and piano was presented in New York City in 2019. In 2021, Some Call it Home, a dramatic work commissioned by University of Plymouth as part of the Mayflower 400 commemorations, was premiered in Plymouth, England. In 2022 Navarra Quartet featured the passing sound of forever in a concert at Kings Place London, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland premiered unfolding soundscapes, for piano and orchestra, in Galway and Dublin.

'Mystic Play of Shadows' was written at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan and was inspired by the birdsong around the lake at dusk. The descriptive title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and is one of O’Leary’s earliest works for string quartet, a medium that she has explored extensively ever since. As with much of the composer’s work, the music is evocative and concerned with instrumental colour and texture, drawing the listener in to an imagined landscape. 'Mystic Play of Shadows' was premièred on 24 June 1996 by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry, Co. Cork.