Press

“Dowling’s score is sensitively wrought, catching the child’s desperate situation, the music mournful yet equally unsettling” (Opera Wire)

“One of the most simple and affecting pieces is Her Name by Alex Dowling.. Strings and synthesizer revisit a world of ancient polyphony, poignant and elegiac” (The Guardian)

“A great short opera should be like a great short story: a tight scenario with a distilled text that hints at a universe beyond its borders. Alex Dowling’s Her Name manages this best, a poignant story of a choirboy at boarding school mourning the loss of his mother, set to subtle, sympathetic music.” (The Times UK)

“One powerful group of works looks at death: In Alex Dowling’s “Her Name,” a sweet-voiced choirboy mourns his mother.” (Wall Street Journal)

“Mark O’Halloran’s simple, naturalistic text is as unadorned, direct and raw as Dowling’s beautifully gentle melodic fragments” (Opera Today)

“Dowling’s music.. skillfully follows the emotional contours of the text producing a rounded portrait of the boy’s repressed feelings of loss.” (Journal of Music)

“Alex Dowling’s Her Name was a plaintive meditation on loss and featured a young boy secretly mourning the loss of his mother at a boarding school in Dublin.  Boy soprano, Seán Hayden sang the principal role with enormous confidence and authority against a rich accompaniment on the strings.” (Seen and Heard International)

“With so many artists, creators and performers involved, it’s impossible to do justice to the enterprise without overloading the review with a list of names, so I’ll just mention a few that left an immediate and lasting impression… ‘Her Name’, (Alex Dowling/Mark O’Halloran) has boy soprano Sean Hayden in a beautiful elegiac account of a young boy at boarding school suffering the consequences of his mother’s death”. (The Irish Mail on Sunday)

‘Her Name’ is “a reminder that classic arias have a direct route to the core of the psyche, with opera doing what it arguably does best: providing a gateway to deep emotion” (Irish Independent)

Photo by Johanna Austin

“The music is absolutely ravishing, thanks to composer/director Alex Dowling and singer-musicians Liz Filios, Brenson Thomas, and Emma O’Halloran. Their sensuously processed harmonies excelled in the passage beginning, “What is here?: a place or an idea, a circle focused in God’s eye, a cosmic wave’s frozen frame, transient, doomed?” - John Timpane (Philadelphia Inquirer)

“For the next hour the actors and their accompanying musicians above on the catwalk move through the pared-down poem, alternating between vignettes with the onstage actors and music breaks with music director and sound designer Alex Dowling and his cohort of singers (Liz Filios, Emma O’Halloran, and Brenson Thomas) performing his electro-futuristic compositions. The haunting music pairs nicely with the visual landscape.” - Alix Rosenfeld (Broadstreet Review)

“Adnan's poem is a remarkable tapestry that probes the tensions between the individual and other people, other nations, and the earth itself. Composer and music director Alex Dowling has created an eerie and bracing soundtrack for the piece.” - Rebecca Rendell (Talkin’ Broadway)

“With its hefty subtitle, “In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other,” There is a rare bird: contemporary poetry on stage. Making rarefied language solid and visceral is Wilma’s HotHouse company, and the result is visually arresting and aurally haunting.” - Toby Zinman (Phindie)