Gerald Barry: Piano Quartet and other works

"In the 70s, Barry was a pupil of Stockhausen and Kagel; he returned to Ireland, where he now lives between Dublin and a cottage perched on the brutally beautiful Atlantic coast of Galway opposite the Aran islands – a place where he sang me his version of Lady Bracknell to my open-jawed astonishment. That's a common feeling when you're listening to Barry's music, whether his Handel-inspired opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, his brilliant operatic realisation of Fassbinder's film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, or any of his orchestral and chamber pieces, from the delirious scales of _______ (yes, that really is a title), to the outright hysteria of Bob, or the full-on orchestral onslaught of Chevaux-de-frise. Unlike so many other contemporary composers whose music is concerned with creating an artful craft of transition, a sound world of diaphanous meltings and meldings from one idea to another, Barry's is a world of sharp edges, of precisely defined yet utterly unpredictable musical objects. His music sounds like no one else's in its diamond-like hardness, its humour, and sometimes, its violence" (Tom Service, "A Guide to Gerald Barry's Music," Guardian, 1/7/13).

View catalog record here!