Ina Boyle Pat O’Kelly
In September 2016 the National Concert Hall, RTÉ and Bord na Móna devised a celebration of music spanning the previous century. Entitled Composing the Island, it was a bold endeavour but, maybe at the end of its three-week run, one had become somewhat saturated and I remember suffering, what I call, musical indigestion.
Undoubtedly Composing the Ireland had merit and the range of its material from the relatively old – Charles Villiers Stanford – to the comparatively young – Deirdre Gribben – was extraordinary. I continue to find Ms Gribben’s violin concerto Venus Burning quite fascinating and keep returning to it on the RTÉ lyric fm label, CD 125.
But the opening event of Composing the Island revived music by two composers with birthdays in 1889 – Norman Hay, born in Kent but who spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and Selina Boyle. Better known as Ina, she hailed from Bushey Park House in Enniskerry where she lived until her death in 1967.
In a sheltered childhood, her first music lessons came from her clergyman and violinmaker father, William. Aged 11 she began theory and harmony classes with Samuel Spencer Myerscough, founder of the Leinster School of Music, who encouraged her efforts at composition. Ina Boyle also studied with Percy Buck and Charles Kitson, professors at TCD and UCD respectively.
Early success came with her orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp premièred by the London Symphony in 1920. Three years later Ina Boyle began taking occasional lessons in London from the eminent Ralph Vaughan Williams, who thought highly of her compositions. Despite that, few of them came to the public’s attention.
Prolific output
Undeterred, Ina Boyle continued her prolific output, including three symphonies, an opera Maudlin at Paplewick, based on a pastoral play by Ben Jonson, and a ballet The Dance of Death after the woodcuts of Hans Holbein.
But interest in the composer has recently received a significant boost through a book and a CD. The former, Ina Boyle 1889–1967 a composer’s Life (Cork University Press), is the result of a dedicated labour of love from Ita Beausang and Séamus de Barra.
The publication follows painstaking research long underway before Composing the Island was conceived. The concise volume is most welcome not only for Ms Beausang’s lucidity in detailing Ina Boyle’s life but also for de Barra’s insightful analysis of her music.
The CD comes on an English label – BBC/Dutton Epoch CDLX 7352 – and features the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Ronald Corp. They offer a selection of Boyle’s works written between 1919 and 1934, including her Violin Concerto and 1st Symphony, subtitled Glencree (In the Wicklow Hills). The Concerto has New Zealand-born Benjamin Baker as its refined and sensitive soloist.
Both works, and indeed the rest of the items on the disc, receive persuasive and sympathetic performances and convey the pastoral sentiment as well as the dramatic intensity running through the music.
Under Corp, the BBC musicians’ imaginative response to Ina Boyle’s 1st Symphony expressively reflects “the inspiration that she found in nature and the ever-changing Wicklow landscape”.