David Fennessy
Irish composer David Fennessy’s music is regularly performed by leading international orchestras and ensembles. His eclectic but distinctive style has led to works for the stage, orchestral and choral music as well as an extensive body of chamber music.
He gained notoriety from a series of collaborations with the leading German new music orchestra Ensemble Modern – 13 Factories (2009), La Rejouissance, La Paix (2010) and CODA (2020) as well as 2022’s OPEN GROUND.
Fennessy’s 2011 “sort-of” opera Pass the Spoon was written with the renowned English visual artist David Shrigley resulting in performances at the Southbank Centre in London and was recently revived for a run of ten performances by Opera North in England (December 2025). Sweat of the Sun, a large scale music theatre work for actors, singers, electronics and orchestra was commissioned by and first performed at the Munich Biennale in 2016.
Recent highlights include a violin concerto Blood (2024), and Bog Cantata (2025) written for the Dunedin Consort, to a newly commissioned libretto from the Irish playwright Marina Carr, which was shortlisted for a 2026 Royal Philharmonic Society Award. Bones (2026) received its Irish premiere at New Music Dublin in April 2026 by the Belgian chamber group Het Collectief. The complete, revised version of Conquest of the Useless, an epic trilogy of orchestral pieces inspired by the troubled production of Werner Herzog’s 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, was given it’s premiere by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Jack Sheen with the composer himself as electric guitar soloist in November 2023.
On disk, his Triptych recorded by Chamber Choir Ireland on the Naxos label won a Scottish Award for New Music and his debut CD Panopticon was released on the NMC label. A new CD of his work Caruso, was released on the Unsounds label in 2024. 2026 has also seen releases of recordings of Piano Trio No. 2 by the Fidelio Trio and Two Pieces about Heinrich Schütz by the Marion Consort.
David lives and works in Glasgow, where he teaches composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is currently working on THE NOISE, a new electric guitar concerto for Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe to be premiered at New Music Dublin in spring 2027.
