Donnacha Dennehy
Hailed as “Ireland’s most important living composer” by the New York Times, Donnacha Dennehy’s Grammy award winning music has been called “thrilling” (Guardian), “mesmerizing” (New York Times) “arrestingly beautiful” (New Yorker) and “shockingly original, while also being compulsively listenable” (Boston Globe). Collaborations include pieces with the writers Colm Tóibín (The Dark Places and a forthcoming choral work), the director Tom Creed (The Hunger, stage version) and Enda Walsh (a trilogy of operas).
Dennehy founded Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s now-renowned new music group, while still in his twenties in 1997. Alongside the singers Dawn Upshaw and Iarla O’Lionáird, Crash Ensemble features on the debut 2011 Nonesuch release of Dennehy’s music, entitled Grá agus Bás, beginning an association between Dennehy and Nonesuch that continues today. Other releases include a number by NMC Records in London, Signum in London, Bedroom Community in Reykjavik and New Amsterdam and Cantaloupe in New York. Nonesuch released have released two subsequent portrait CDs, The Hunger in 2019 and Land of Winter, in November 2024.
Land of Winter was nominated for two Grammys and won the 2026 Grammy for best chamber music/small ensemble performance. It also made best of the year lists from the New York Times, Boston Globe and Gramophone among others. Dennehy completed a trilogy of operas with the writer/director Enda Walsh: The Last Hotel (2015), The Second Violinist (2017) and The First Child (2021); and a docu-cantata The Hunger (2012-16, concert version 2019), originally co-produced by Alarm Will Sound and Opera Theatre St. Louis. Dennehy’s single-movement orchestral piece Crane was ‘recommended’ by the International Rostrum of Composers (2010). In 2017, he won the FEDORA-Generali Prize for Opera (Salzburg/Paris), and in 2021 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2024 he won a Koussevitsky commission, and in 2025 he was nominated for two Grammys, winning one for Land of Winter at the 2026 Awards. He now lives in America and is a professor of music at Princeton University. His music is published by G. Schirmer in New York.
