When: 7.30pm on Friday 21 February 2025
Where: Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 6BF 

We’re delighted to welcome Dustin O’Halloran back to Manchester!

Dustin O’Halloran is an American pianist and composer with six acclaimed solo albums under his own name, and is a member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen, which has released five albums, some based on scores and soundtracks.

He previously released music with dreampop band Devics – which he co-founded with Sara Lov in his late teens before embarking on a solo career. Tracks from his debut solo album Piano Solos (2004) caught the attention of music supervisor Brian Reitzell, who shared them with Sofia Coppola to help inspire her script for Marie Antoinette. Coppola invited him to contribute music to the film, which marked his breakthrough as a film composer. These tracks were subsequently included in his second solo album Piano Solos Vol 2 (2006).

O’Halloran’s third and fourth solo albums Vorleben (2010) and Lumiere (2011) followed, with the latter being mixed by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. In 2011, he also co-founded the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, while continuing his work scoring films.

As part of A Winged Victory For The Sullen, he worked on Jalil Lespert’s film In the Shadow of Iris in 2016. This music was released as the album Iris the same year. The band’s catalogue also includes Atomos (2014), based on music composed for a dance piece by Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer for The Royal Ballet in London; The Undivided Five (2019), which was released by Ninja Tune; and their last album Invisible Cities (2021), released as a side project under their own label Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing. It contains music from the Manchester International Festival-produced live performance Invisible Cities, which the band scored in 2019.

O’Halloran signed with renowned classical music label Deutsche Grammophon in early 2019, releasing the EP Sundoor (2019), which offers a 20-minute piece entitled ‘196 Hz’, adapted from a 2017 site-specific composition for cross-disciplinary American artist Slater Bradley’s ‘Sundoor At World’s End’. His next album released by the label, Silfur (2021), revisits select songs from his catalogue, exploring time and place. In 2021, he contributed What Gently Flutters to the Deutsche Grammophon Christmas album Winter Tales, featuring Bryan Senti.

O’Halloran also produced Katy Perry’s Into Me You See on her 2017 album Witness, collaborated with Gyda Valty?sdóttir for the EP 3 Movements in 2017, and appears on Leonard Cohen’s 2019 posthumous album Thanks For The Dance.

In 2019 he premiered the electronic composition 1 0 0 1 at Minneapolis’s Liquid Music Series with choreographer Fukiko Takase. It was well-received, but subsequent productions were halted by the pandemic. O’Halloran’s latest record 1 0 0 1, released on Deutsche Grammophon in March 2024, is an expansion of that composition, marking a departure from the introspective solo piano music with which he first made his name. Recorded at RRO Studios in Reykjavík, it features his collaborator Bryan Senti on violin, an eight-voice choir, Paul Corley on electronic production, and the Budapest Art Orchestra orchestrated by Roman Vinuesa, mixed by Francesco Donadello.

Tour support comes from Margaret Hermant. Margaret Hermant is a violinist, harpist and composer based in Brussels, who graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. She is a founding member of several music groups, including Echo Collective, Quatuor MP4 and BOW quintet. Her collaborations with these ensembles have involved working with a variety of renowned artists, such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Adam Wiltzie, Dustin O’Halloran, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Stars of the Lid, Joep Beving, Christina Vantzou and Rutger Hoedemaekers. These collaborations have helped bring to life works in the Post Classical Music genre.

Age restriction: 14+. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

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