The Wild Heart by Dylan Mattingly
Nonesuch Records released the label debut from composer Dylan Mattingly, The Wild Heart, performed by Contemporaneous with conductor David Bloom and vocal soloist Iarla Ó Lionáird, on June 26, 2026. The Wild Heart comprises the five-movement work The Transmutation Notebooks as well as Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things).
“Dylan Mattingly is a true original whose music fills the listener with a sense of overflowing abundance," says composer John Adams. "Dylan’s default mode is intense, ecstatic: his music clangs and chimes, and its resonances seem to linger in the ear long after the physical sound ceases. Events can feel like they're moving in slow sync with the rhythms of the celestial orbs but then will break out into some euphoric pagan jig. He’s a genuine American Maverick in the true sense of the term.”
Iarla Ó Lionáird—one of the leading contemporary vocalists of the traditional sean nós Irish song style—is featured on two movements from The Transmutation Notebooks. (Mattingly first heard the singer on Donnacha Dennehy’s Nonesuch recording of Grá agus Bas). Mattingly considers Ó Lionáird to be a “modern-day Homeric bard,” singing in an “imagined tradition of oral epic, as if it had evolved continuously over 2,700 years.”
Nonesuch Records, 2026
