What makes a political folk opera work? Do traditional musicians go far enough in their experimentations? And what is the ‘social side’ of classical music? Toner Quinn reflects on a range of questions raised by the musical riches at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival.
I’m picking up fragments of a conversation at the next table in Kilkenny’s Marble City Bar. It’s initially good humoured but then starts to heat up. ‘The EU is a German project, not a European project!… What Ireland should do is… What we need is… no, no, no… listen, that won’t happen…”. The accents are Irish, British, Eastern European. Nothing special about a chat like that in Ireland these days? If you were at Kilkenny Arts Festival this year, it certainly felt different.
The previous night I had attended Counting Sheep, a folk opera by musicians Mark and Marichka Marczyk and featuring the Lemon Bucket Orkestra. There was something about the way Festival Director Eugene Downes spoke about it as he introduced a different concert on the Monday night that compelled me to go. ‘It’s about freedom,’ he said, pausing, still obviously dwelling on the performance he’d seen that night.
Immersive
There are two ways of attending Counting Sheep, ’viewing’ and ‘immersive’. Immersive enter first. Marichka sits at the piano playing accompaniment to Mark Marczyk’s fiddle. We sit at, or around, a table (the viewing audience are seated further back) and a cast of perhaps ten begin to serve food and drink – bread, broth and bright-coloured drinks. Moments later, the Ukrainian special police – the Berkut – will appear and forcefully charge down the table. The audience scatter. What was festive turns into horror – with the audience at the centre. Continue reading →
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