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I enclose here the programme notes written by John McGlynn for the National Concert Hall gig on the 17th of July 2009.

“Michael has always been an obsessive. As teenagers he would make me sit and listen to something that he’d dragged in from Freebird Records. Over and over he’d play it, stopping to enthuse over some bizarre change in mood or dynamic. John Foxx, Gary Numan, Renaissance, Clannad and Pentangle. There was weirder stuff but I think he realised how much I could take even then. If you have the right background and are of a “certain age” you’ll hear echoes of Sidney Sager’s incidental music for the utterly terrifying Children of the Stones and György Ligeti’s clouds of vocals from 2001: A Space Odyssey in Michael’s own compositions. It was from this melting pot that the inspiration for Anúna grew.

We began as singers long before that with our unforgettable rendition of the Rolf Harris song “Jake the Peg” in front of our entire school. Nearly forty years later we still get reminded by former classmates of the tiny twins sellotaped together on the gymnasium stage. We then went our separate ways musically, apart from his insistence on regularly confounding me with whatever strange new band or piece of music he felt the need to share.

Bizarrely some of my music rubbed off on him, enough of it for him to ask me to sing the solo on “Mysterious Ways” for the launch of U2’s album Achtung Baby in 1991 on a freezing November morning on Grafton Street. He hadn’t a clue what he was at no more than I did. However that was the morning that An Uaithne became Anúna. Suddenly we had farmers, doctors and traditional singers auditioning for a choral group. There was definitely something going on.

Before the release of the album Anúna in 1993 it was commonplace to see Elvis Costello or Larry Mullan peering back at us from a small audience. We slowly became a cult in Ireland and ever more impossible to categorise. Largely ignored by the mainstream, we were lucky to have a truly sophisticated and musically unpretentious audience for those early years. As time has passed the music has grown and developed, but it still retains that edginess and cultish ambience that allows Anúna to be re-discovered by new generations over and over again. A footnote to this would be one terrific memory I have of doing a corporate performance in 2006. I decided that we would really push the audience and do Michael’s less-accessible but beautiful arrangement of “Ardaigh Cuan”. At after-dinner events it is always a risk when your audience is full of expensive food and wine to do something that will stretch them. Just as the piece tapered to a thunderous close a single figure jumped up in the middle of the room wearing shades. “Rockin’! shouted Bono “Rockin’ man!”.

It says a lot that Michael considers each album to be the defining one. Our latest release Sanctus includes Antonio Lotti’s (1667-1740) “Crucifixus” and Gregorio Allegri’s (1582-1652) fabulous “Miserere Mei Deus”{. His decision to include two of the world’s greatest choral works on an Anúna album has brought Michael’s own compositions to a new level of maturity, and the album includes five of those. The simultaneous release of the stunning DVD Invocations of Ireland, a visual hymn to our native land, has wrapped up the last ten years of the group into a single defining audio-visual record. Filmed, directed and edited by Michael himself, the door is now open to a future based on hugely solid foundations.

From year to year we find and develop new singers. The average age of the group has dropped five years in the last ten. It has become extremely important for us to have answers to their many questions. How do you start explaining to a nineteen year-old about the history and development of something for which there is no frame of reference anywhere in the world?

That journey has been remarkable and I have many memories; arguing with the technical staff of the Royal Albert Hall about putting Anúna into the middle of a five thousand-strong audience for the BBC Proms during a solar eclipse; listening to the eerie footsteps of the singers on the walkways in Kilmainham Gaol as the heterophony of “Jerusalem” filled this historic and tragic place; Basque waiters and kitchen staff crying as they give us an ovation in the corridor after a concert in the Armada Museum in Barcelona; birds singing over our heads in a great ancient tree in the garden of an ancient palace at the World Sacred Music Festival in Fes, Morocco; a huge shout of “GOOOOOOOOAAAAL!!!” in the middle of an outdoor concert in Castello d’Empuries in Spain; corpsing as the MC falls off the stage in Helsingborg and no one being able to intone the “Media Vita”; Michael complaining about Sting’s Irish pronunciation during the recording of “Mo Gille Mear” with the Chieftains and Paddy Moloney trying not to laugh; a “Who Can Sing the Highest Note“ competition (Michael claims to have won) with the late Jeff Buckley in the toilets of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; opening night of Riverdance on St. Patricks Day in Radio City, New York in the snow; good-natured heckling by a lone Scots-American at the BBC Belfast Proms in front of 14,000 people; singing to a packed rush-hour crowd in the Subte (Subway) in Buenos Aires on a state visit with President Mary McAleese. Countless memories with no chronology, linked by Michael’s music and all part of a great story that doesn’t show any sign of drawing to a close.

Late in 1989 Michael nervously handed me a strange little tape covered in his own very careful calligraphy with the words An Uaithne on the front and spine. I was an Architectural student drawing into the early hours most nights. As obsessive as my twin I played nothing else for a year. I couldn’t believe it when he asked me to join this group and I still can’t.”

John McGlynn
June 2009