Deirdre's setting of Anahorish by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney was presented to him on receipt of a lifetime acheivement award from Queen's University Belfast, and is recorded here for the first time.

Gribbin has worked collaboratively with director Lou Stein and Bruce Springsteen’s lighting designer Jeff Ravitz on the staging of her violin concerto Venus Blazing, which toured throughout the UK, premiering at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

This new release presents chamber works for string quartet and soloists by Belfast-born composer, Deirdre Gribbin. Her Catholic background, identification with Celtic folk tradition, fascination for myth, and love of remote places with big skies and water, have all infl uenced her work, but also she enjoys the buzz and relentless pace of city life in London where she now lives.

We are delighted to welcome soprano Patricia Rozario - a singer who has inspired several of the world’s leading composers to write for her, most notably Arvo Pärt and Sir John Tavener - and the internationally renowned RTÉ Vanburgh Quartet to the label. With trumpeter Mark O'Keeffe they perform the title work Island People, a song-cycle setting verses by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

Also on this recording are Crossing the Sea for mezzo (Loré Lixenberg) and quartet, which sets 7th century Chinese Tang poetry, and What the Whaleship Saw for quartet, inspired by a grisly incident in 1820 involving the crew aboard a shipwrecked whaling ship who resort to cannibalism in order to survive - depicting the darkest human instinct for survival.