After a wave of well-earned acclaim and a standout appearance on Channel 4’s The Piano, Irish composer and pianist Gerard O’Donnell returns with In Honour of the Moon — a haunting new album that feels less like a release and more like a ritual. The nine-part nocturne cycle marks O’Donnell’s most focused and transportive work to date. Here, the moon isn’t just a theme—it’s a quiet companion, overseeing a landscape of memory, stillness, and ancestral resonance.
Structured in three movements, the album opens with the ceremonial weight of its title track, where piano notes feel carved from stone, standing like ancient monoliths. From there, O’Donnell wanders through mist and metaphor—Ghost channels the Irish tradition of seeing the dead not as gone, but deeply near, while Porcelain captures the breakable beauty of that half-light before dawn. There’s political memory too, in the quietly stirring Should England Sing, where tenderness and resistance share space like breath and silence.
At the album’s core, O’Donnell leans into myth and wildness. He by Water is stoic and elemental—each note like a ripple in time—while I mo Mharbhcholadh explodes with folklore mischief, recalling nights when stories danced through Gaelic voices under moonlight. The return of the title motif in Part 2 is intimate, stripped of ceremony, as if the moon has leaned in close. And then comes Solstice, the wild heart of it all: ecstatic, raw, almost pagan in its drive, before the closing piece gently gathers the journey’s emotional weight, letting familiar motifs re-emerge—changed, softened, remembered.
This is no casual listen. In Honour of the Moon demands—and rewards—deep attention. O’Donnell fuses classical architecture with ambient expanse and the pulse of Irish folk tradition, not to impress, but to invite. Each track feels like a hand extended into shadow, leading us through a night full of ghosts, rivers, stories, and light. It’s a quietly radical work—soulful, poetic, and unafraid to sit in stillness. This album proves it’s also quietly visionary.
