Given ongoing climate events, awareness of and action on global warming has never been so important. On October 9, the National Concert Hall hosts an evening of music inspired by the current plight. Songwriter and producer Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors will perform his new orchestral songcycle Song of the Earth with the s t a r g a z e ensemble and his fellow Dirty Projectors vocalist Felicia Douglass. The evening’s concert will also feature a performance of the entirety of Dirty Projectors’ Earth Crisis, from their 2020 collection 5 EPs, and a short solo set from Longstreth.
Song of the Earth is modelled loosely on the themes and structure of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde. But where Mahler’s epic is a meditation — by turns spiritual and pastoral — on the impermanence of all things, Song of the Earth is focused on a more specific vulnerability: the natural world in our Anthropocene age. For this special concert, the Berlin-based ensemble s t a r g a z e under conductor André de Ridder accompanies the two vocalists as they sing of ecological collapse and rebirth.
Founded in New York in 2002 by Longstreth, Dirty Projectors have released eight full-length albums to date. Constantly evolving and blithely difficult to pin down, they’ve made a career of following inspiration where it leads, collaborating with everyone from Björk, David Byrne and Kanye West along the way. Felicia Douglass joined the group in 2018.
Song of the Earth was commissioned by the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Helsinki Festival, the Barbican Center London, the National Concert Hall, Dublin and De Singel Antwerp.
Tickets €18, €24.50, €29.50
On Sale 10am Friday 12 August
10% Discount for Friends of NCH