The world wakes up to Irish “Sleepsongs”
Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano.
Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.
Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.
You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:
“Portraitures and caricatures: Conductors, Pianist, Composers”
here.
Most of the songs are taken from Irish tradition, some of them centuries old, others more recent, originally intended for a mother to sing to her children. Ms. O’Leary is backed up by her very Irish band Dulra.
An accomplished arranger and performer, Ms. O’Leary explains in her liner notes that she collected the songs over a period of years and finally selected these as her favorites for their “rich and colorful imagery and the range of moods”. Such evocative titles as “O Woman Beside the Stream”, “On the Fairy Mound” and “Little Cuckoo” help set up the ambiance for a mellow experience.
The lyrics were researched academically and are printed in both Gaelic and English in the handsome accompanying album.
Instrumentation includes a panoply typical of the Irish music culture: the bodhran (a drum often described as the “heartbeat of Irish music”), a cello, a flute and whistle, a fiddle, clarinets, bass viol and lira da gamba. The effect transports the listener to the Irish countryside.
A major bonus in the album is the 40-page album of photographs illustrating the themes of each song. Irish photographer Laelia Milleri places Ms. O’Leary in various extravagant poses.
Behind this album and several others in the past two years is the visionary founder and CEO of Heresy Records, Eric Fraad, an expatriate American living near Dublin. Fraad brings a distinguished U.S. pedigree of music and opera direction, including experience co-producing New York shows with the late Joseph Papp.
Among Heresy’s recent releases is “Possessed”, a musical voyage demonstrating how cults can use “particular instruments in specific ways to signal or instigate trance that leads to and incorporates possession”, Fraad writes in the album’s notes.
Elaborate imagery is a hallmark of Heresy productions. “Possessed” cover art references Sigmund Freud and Hollywood films. Another recent release, “On the Nature of Electricity and Acoustics”, features electro-acoustic music from Ireland. On the cover is Benjamin Franklin catching electricity from a stormy sky. Fraad writes that the music reflects “isolation, restiveness, melancholy and poetry of the place”.
Fraad serves as conceptualizer and creative director of each project and brings in established designers to create stunning graphic effects for the albums, a rare quality in today’s spare downloaded digitized music world. His work has attracted a following for its originality, the quality of the music and the CD design.
Heresy specializes in early music, traditional and world music, folk, contemporary classical, electronic music and innovative fusions of these styles.
Fraad says his recordings seek to create a “new, vital and unexpected approach to the ever-changing relationship between the yesterday and today.”
With a plethora of new delivery mechanisms, “nobody”, says Fraad, “knows what’s happening or where the music field going.” But these uncertainties have not stopped him from pressing ahead with his sassy new label. Just two years old, Heresy crosses over from traditional Irish music to classical, “casting our net wider and wider”. He is fighting the sclerotic world of classical music, which he describes as “very uptight”.
So far in its short life, Heresy is proving to the antithesis of uptight.
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