Opera: New Music for Violin

Talented young duo Darragh Morgan (violin) and Mary Dullea (piano) feature on a disc of new works written especially for them by leading young composers Joe Cutler, Bryn Harrison, Jonathan Powell and Joseph Phibbs. The title work, Morgan Hayes’ Opera, is inspired by Italian director Dario Argento's film of a jinxed production of Verdi’s Macbeth; the disc is completed with Richard Causton’s poetic, British Composer Award-winning Seven States of Rain.

"Of the six young British composers sampled here, Joe Cutler dispenses with the piano for a hard-edged fantasy which embraces virtuosity with the freedom of composers as disparate as Pärt and Zimmermann. The other five face the challenge full-on. And it's a full-on sort of disc - you get plenty of notes for your 55 minutes, all of them dispatched fearlessly by Darragh Morgan."
The Strad 2006