A solo guitar recital of "Fragments of Lucia," by Joseph Chester, recorded at a very special evening at the James Joyce Tower & Museum as part of the 2023 Bloomsday Festival.

This live album includes the whole set, plus a performance of Erik Satie's "Gnossienne No. 1," recorded during soundcheck. Recorded, mixed and mastered in High Resolution 24/96.

"Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother." - James Joyce, Ulysses

The Martello Tower in Sandycove is where James Joyce himself lived in 1904 and where he set the opening episode of Ulysses, Telemachus. As such, it was a wonderfully resonant and fitting place to bring this music, inspired by his daughter, Lucia. You will hear quite a bit of singing from the various birds who have made their home in the tower, as well as the distant sounds of the seafront in Sandycove,

Fragments of Lucia is a solo adaptation of the suite, Lucia (for Guitar & Strings) which was first performed at Axis Ballymun on Bloomsday 2022 and released by Bohemia Records in January 2023.

Scores available from payhip.com/JosephChester

“While playing LUCIA with the string section is really a transcendent experience (it literally pushes me transcend my own limitations on the guitar!), playing the piece solo, as I have done many times now, in some quite special places, does allow for a particularly intimate experience with the audience. I’ve been enjoying pushing at the edges of it, finding more and more silence and allowing the music to stretch out in places. No performance is ever quite the same and there were definitely some old ghosts in the tiny sitting room of the Martello Tower in Sandycove when I played there on a beautiful, warm night in June. To say nothing of the very many sea birds who were also in attendance and singing along. I’m very glad that this special night was captured for posterity.

I’ve always been adamant that Lucia is not about James Joyce or Ulysses but entirely about Lucia herself, an attempt to paint a portrait of an erased woman, silenced in life and then once more in death. However, there’s no question that the figure of her father looms large over her story and so to get to tell that story and play this music in that very special and precious place brought a heightened emotion and resonance to the whole thing. Lucia spent a few months in Dublin in 1935, retracing her father’s footsteps. She lived in Bray and it’s hard not to imagine her paying a visit to the Martello Tower where her father lived and where Ulysses begins. Shortly afterwards she was admitted to St. Andrew’s in Northampton until James got her out, saying that “he would never agree to his daughter being incarcerated among the English.” It’s one of the many sad twists in this tale that that is exactly where she would end up.”

– Joseph Chester, Rennes, July 2023


LUCIA Digital Booklet. free download from
www.joechester.com/discography