Princeton, NJ

Princeton Sound Kitchen, Princeton University’s lab for new music by composition faculty and staff, launches its 2019-20 season with a performance by Alarm Will Sound. Princeton composition faculty Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger is a modern cantata that gives a unique perspective on Ireland’s Great Famine. This concert version features the remarkable folk singer and Princeton University Global Scholar Iarla Ó Lionáird, soprano Katherine Manley, and Alarm Will Sound. The Irish folk music narrative is interwoven with personal, historical accounts, where the libretto principally draws from first-hand accounts by Asenath Nicholson, an American humanitarian so moved by the waves of immigrants arriving in New York that she travelled to Ireland to report from the cabins of starving families.