Tuesday 28 April 2026, 7.30pm
Atonal Kat is a sporadic series of sonic soirees curated by Xenia Pestova and Ed Bennett featuring outstanding musicians working in exploratory musics. Join us for intense listening as we walk with our ears.
In composer Morton Feldman's 100th anniversary year, pianist Andrew Zolinsky performs 'Palais De Mari’ - a beautiful and mesmerising 30-minute work of patterns and resonance. Acclaimed Irish singer Michelle O'Rourke gives the UK premiere of Ed Bennett's 'The Wilderness Voices’, a new 40-minute work in six parts for voices, drones and electronics, an optimistic meditation on past and future. The evening opens with one of Feldman's shortest and most transparent works 'Only' for solo voice.
Michelle O’Rourke is a singer who engages fully with the creative spaces she enters. She is passionate about music, and has commissioned, premiered and recorded many new works by living composers. She loves the challenge of finding her voice in more traditional classical music, through collaboration, arrangement or simply dissolving the edges of traditional performance practices.
Currently Michelle is working on an album of her own songs, to follow on from her recent release These Rules Around Us May Alter, an EP of songs on the Ergodos Label. Forthcoming also is her recording of Andrew Hamilton’s phenomenal solo song set O’ROURKE.
2026 will see the premiere of a substantial new solo work for Michelle by lauded Irish composer Ed Bennett, a record of vocal music by Garrett Sholdice, performances of music by Nick Roth, Jane Deasy and Alma Mahler.
Michelle is equally comfortable working alone as in collaborative environments. She is in demand as a collaborator, a vocal coach and music consultant in interdisciplinary work spaces.
Michelle is ever fascinated by the seemingly endless expressive facility of the human voice; how singers have been centric to ritual performance for centuries, and how we continue as performers to evolve the interpretative and performative role of voice.
“O’Rourke’s contributions dazzle with unaffected clarity." (The Guardian)
Andrew Zolinsky has performed at major worldwide festivals and venues, including the International Piano series (Southbank Centre, London) and at Merkin Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Le Poisson Rouge in New York, Venice Biennale, Musica Festival (Strasbourg, France), National Concert Hall (Dublin), Harpa Concert Hall (Reykjavik) and Tempere Biennale (Finland).
He has performed with most of the BBC Orchestras, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lorraine and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.
Andrew is closely associated with the music of Unsuk Chin. He has given the French, London, Irish and Italian premieres of her Six Etudes and the London, Irish and French premières of her Piano Concerto.
Other composers who have written for him include David Lang, Michael Finnissy, Simon Holt, Linda Buckley, Lilija Maria Ásmundsdottir and Pavel Zemek Novak.
Andrew is professor of piano and contemporary piano at the Royal College of Music.
Morton Feldman was born in New York on January 12th 1926. At the age of twelve he studied piano with Madame Maurina-Press, who had been a pupil of Busoni, and it was she who instilled in Feldman a vibrant musicality. At the time he was composing short Scriabinesque pieces, until in 1941 he began to study composition with Wallingford Riegger. Three years later Stefan Wolpe became his teacher, though they spent much of their time together simply arguing about music.
Then in 1949 the most significant meeting up to that time took place - Feldman met John Cage, commencing an artistic association of crucial importance to music in America in the 1950s. Cage was instrumental in encouraging Feldman to have confidence in his instincts, which resulted in totally intuitive compositions. He never worked with any systems that anyone has been able to identify, working from moment to moment, from one sound to the next. His friends during the 1950s in New York included the composers, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, the painters, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg and the pianist, David Tudor. The painters in particular influenced Feldman to search for his own sound world, one that was more immediate and more physical than had existed before.
Irish composer and band leader Ed Bennett’s music is regularly performed and broadcast in over 30 countries in venues including New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, London’s Barbican and South Bank Centres and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Recent projects include ‘Psychedelia’ for the RTE NSO, ’Ausland’ for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Reinbert de Leeuw, ‘Song of the Books’ for the Crash Ensemble and four critically-acclaimed portrait discs of his work. He performs with his 10-piece ensemble Decibel who were described in the Quietus as ‘blending the coiled concentration of the best post-minimalism with the ferocity and dynamic range of thrash metal’ and plays live electronics both solo and in a duo with pianist Xenia Pestova. In 2019 Ed Bennett was awarded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Major Individual Artist Award, the highest honour awarded to an artist from the region, his work has been twice shortlisted for the Ivor Novello awards. His portrait CD ‘Psychedelia’ was described in the Sunday Times as ‘Ebullient, deeply compelling music’ and featured in the New York Times as one of their recommended releases of 2020.
