Irish National Opera Chorus, Crash Ensemble & Ryan McAdams
Biography Irish National Opera Chorus, Crash Ensemble & Ryan McAdams
Crash Ensemble
A group of world-class musicians who play the most adventurous, ground-breaking music of today.
Amazingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things - Crash are innovative, adventurous and ambitious.
Led by our cellist and Artistic Director, Kate Ellis and Principal Conductor, Ryan McAdams, we commission, collaborate, explore, investigate and experiment with a broad spectrum of music creators and artistic collaborators. We love to innovate, with quality always at the heart of everything we do.
Crash Ensemble was founded in 1997 by composer Donnacha Dennehy, conductor and pianist Andrew Synnott, and clarinettist Michael Seaver. Donnacha Dennehy is Crash Artistic Partner.
Crash made an immediate and lasting impact on the Irish arts and cultural landscape, with some of the most distinctive living composers writing for the group; Terry Riley, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Donnacha Dennehy, Louis Andriessen, Jennifer Walshe, Arnold Dreyblatt, Kevin Volans, Ann Cleare, Glen Branca, Nico Muhly, Linda Buckley and Gerald Barry.
As well as performing throughout Ireland, Crash regularly perform internationally, with appearances in the last few years at Tampere Biennale (Finland), The Edinburgh International Festival (UK), The Royal Opera House (London), The Barbican (London), Carnegie Hall (NYC) The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington DC), Virginia Tech (Virginia), GAIDA Festival (Lithuania) and residencies at The Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival (UK) and Princeton University (NJ).
Ryan McAdams
Crash Ensemble named Ryan their Principal Conductor following their performances together at New Music Dublin 2020. Ryan conducted the premiere of Donnacha Dennehy's opera The Second Violinist in Ireland before taking the production to the Barbican in London and would have returned to the work again at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in autumn 2020 had circumstances permitted. The First Child, the last opera in the Donnacha Dennehy/ Enda Walsh trilogy, is currently touring Ireland (2022). Ryan studied at the Juilliard School, Indiana University, and as a Conducting Fellow at Tanglewood. The post of Apprentice Conductor at Lorin Maazel ́s Chateauville Foundation was created for him, and he served as the Assistant Conductor of the Aspen Music Festival. A Fulbright scholar, he served as Apprentice Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, assisting then-Chief Conductor Alan Gilbert. He is the first-ever recipient of the Sir Georg Solti Emerging Conductor Award (now known as the Solti Conducting Award) and the Aspen-Glimmerglass Prize for Opera Conducting.When Ryan is not travelling, he lives in Brighton with his wife, the dancer and theatre artist Laura Careless, and their son Owain, while maintaining a close connection to New York's Hudson Valley where they spent the last couple of years.
