RTÉ Player has launched a new on-demand Culture collection, featuring an eclectic mix of documentaries and performances from the worlds of Music, Arts, Film & TV and Literature.
Each week, the RTÉ Player team suggest a ‘must-watch’ from the Culture collection and this week it is the performance of Norman Hay’s The Wind Among the Reeds (1921), performed as part of the Composing the Island: A Century of Music in Ireland 1916-2016 series at the National Concert Hall.
The uplifting work was written by the now largely forgotten Norman Hay. English born, Norman Hay grew up in Coleraine and became a very influential figure in Northern Ireland’s musical life as a composer, arranger, organist, music critic and lecturer at Queens University. A setting of seven poems from the 1899 collection with the same title by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), The Wind Among the Reeds was written between September and December 1921 when Belfast was in a state of civil unrest. Watch the moving performance on RTÉ Player here..
The full Composing the Island series is also available to watch on RTÉ Player and features concerts of orchestral, choral, instrumental, song and chamber music by Irish composers written between 1916 and 2016 revealing how this music developed and the times and circumstances in which it was written.
