Gerald Barry (composer)

Gerald Barry was born in Clarehill, Clarecastle, County Clare, in the Republic of Ireland. He was educated at St. Flannan's College, Ennis, County Clare. He went on to study music at University College Dublin, in Amsterdam with Peter Schat, in Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel, and in Vienna with Friedrich Cerha. Barry taught at University College Cork from 1982 to 1986. Growing up in rural Clare, he had little exposure to music except through the radio: "The thing that was the lightning flash for me, in terms of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, would have been an aria from a Handel opera, from Xerxes maybe, that I heard on the radio. I heard this woman singing this, and bang – my head went. And that was how I discovered music." "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." He often conceives of material independently of its instrumental medium, recycling ideas from piece to piece, as in the reworking of Triorchic Blues from a violin to a piano piece to an aria for countertenor in his television opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit:It seemed to me unprecedented: the combination of the ferociously objective treatment of the material and the intense passion of the working-out, and both at an extreme of brilliance. And the harmony – that there was harmony at all, and that it was so beautiful and lapidary. It functions, again, irrationally, but powerfully, to build tension and to create structure. It wasn't just repetitive. It builds. And the virtuosity, the display of it, that combination of things seemed, to me, to be new, and a major way forward. His most recent opera, The Importance of Being Earnest, has become a huge success after its world premiere at Los Angeles and European premiere at the Barbican, London. A critic comments:He writes "what he likes" in the way Strindberg does, not trying to characterise his characters, but letting them perform his own specialities, a kind of platform for his own musical specialities. As in Strindberg where you feel every sentence stands for itself and the characters are sort of borrowed for the use of saying them (borrowed to flesh out the text, rather than the other way round), that they've been out for the day. In Gerald's opera the whole apparatus – for that's what it is – takes on a kind of surrealistic shape, like one person's torso on someone else's legs being forced to walk, half the characters in the opera and half the composer.The Importance of Being Earnest was awarded the Royal Philhamonic Society Prize for Large Scale Composition in 2013. In 2022 the Berlin Philharmonic commissioned Aus Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, a double bass concerto based on Act 2 from Petra, premiered in Berlin in June 2022, played by Matthew Mcdonald and conducted by John Storgards. In September 2022 the Berlin Philharmonic played Barry’s orchestral piece, Chevaux de frise, conducted by Thomas Adès. Barry’s Kafka’s Earplugs was premiered at the 2023 BBC Proms with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgards. ==Selected works==