Ina Boyle (1889-1967): Songs
Release Date: 27 August 2021
Paula Murrihy
Mezzo-Soprano
Ben McAteer
Baritone
Robin Tritschler
Tenor
Iain Burnside
Piano
In lifelong seclusion in rural County Wicklow, Ina Boyle created a legacy of song – tender, often melancholy, illuminated by an exquisite sense for harmony. ‘I think it is most courageous of you to go on with such little recognition,’ wrote Vaughan Williams to his pupil. ‘The only thing to say is that it does come finally.’
Amid the 2020 pandemic, Iain Burnside gathered three superb Irish singers at London’s Wigmore Hall. Recorded in less than five hours, the resulting 80 minutes of music unveil a composer who is one of Ireland’s ‘invisible heroines’.
Half a century after Boyle’s death, is Vaughan Williams’s prediction at last coming true?
“Burnside allures the ear at every turn”
Recording of the CD
"It was socially distanced ‘lights, camera, action’ at the Wigmore Hall as performers brought the music of Ina Boyle to Life."
Discover the behind-the-scenes work that goes in to bringing Ina Boyle's wonderful music to life with interviews by musicians, researchers and the IBSL's founder, Katie Rowan.
Recovering Ina’s Music
The recording of 37 songs by the Irish composer required a great deal of restorative work to create typeset editions of the music. In fact, 95% of the songs were previously only in Ina’s original manuscripts. The work of Government of Ireland PhD Scholar, Orla Shannon, has been crucial to the album’s creation:
"We went into Trinity College Dublin, photographed the original manuscripts that will have been in Ina Boyle’s own handwriting and created typeset critical editions of these scores."
The songs available on the upcoming album will paint a picture of Ina Boyle’s entire musical life, spanning from her early works from around the time of the First World War to the Three Songs by Walter de la Mare. In his article (“The Show Must Go On“) that details the recording session, Roy Stanley writes:
“Boyle was inspired to set words by a wide range of poets, from Sir Philip Sidney, George Herbert and Robert Herrick to more recent writers such as Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Sitwell, and Walter de la Mare. Settings of poems by several near-contemporary Irish poets also feature – Eva Gore-Booth, Patrick Pearse, W.B. Yeats, Austin Clarke, and James Stephens.”