The Midwinter Festival in Galway focused on early Beethoven this year, and brought a renowned piano-violin partnership to the west. Toner Quinn reviews.

Music for Galway’s Midwinter Festival (17–19 January) was the first major musical event of the European Capital of Culture celebrations in Galway, although the year does not officially get underway until February. Despite all the challenges for Galway 2020, there is a sense that this is going to be an exceptional year for the city and county. Galway has a strong cultural life already. Add in an additional layer and we can’t anticipate the impact it will have.

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Irish harping has been given recognition by UNESCO. It is an important moment for Irish music, writes Toner Quinn.

The inaugural TradTalk conference, a new discussion forum for traditional artists, took place last weekend (16 November). Toner Quinn reflects on some of the issues raised.

Traditional music once comforted us and reassured us, writes Toner Quinn, but not Lankum.

The Irish Memory Orchestra and 26 musicians with sight loss gave the world premiere of Dave Flynn’s Vision Symphony last weekend. Toner Quinn reviews.

Last weekend (12 Oct.), Irish National Opera gave the first ever Irish performance of an opera by Vivaldi – the story of a formidable woman subjected to ridicule and abuse. Toner Quinn reviews.

The first piece of set design you notice in Irish National Opera’s production of Griselda (Town Hall Theatre, Galway, 12 Oct.) are the eight screens stacked on top of a guard booth to the right of the stage. A laptop and additional screens sit inside the booth; it is clearly a centre of acute observation. Centre stage is a two-floor setting; above is smart, even salubrious, with white walls, a long table, glasses and bottled water; below is functional: a plywood structure, an emergency exit sign and scaffolding. It’s a tale of two worlds: privilege and power, vulnerability and abuse.
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Just as the Galway Jazz Festival was beginning last week, a surprising discussion took place on RTÉ Radio 1. The subject was Seán Ó Riada and his legacy on the forty-eighth anniversary of the composer’s death. Forty-eight years is a long time and one would expect that we would have a clear understanding of his work at this stage, but the discussion fell back on familiar notions: how he ‘changed traditional Irish music’ (he did not but he did popularise it) and how he never managed to resolve the ‘artistic tensions’ in his music between the ‘native’ and ‘European art music’ (he absolutely did with his Nomos works). So there were not many new insights in the discussion, and we have to ask for how much longer Ireland will be in the dark about its own music if we can’t even have a decent discussion about one of its well-known figures. If we can’t get that right, how can we understand what has happened since?

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In Tom Goodwin’s 2018 book Digital Darwinism, he asks the most difficult question of media executives: If you were to start your company today, what would it look like and what would it do? Such is the changed environment for broadcasters and publishers that there are no easy answers, but the starting place, Goodwin argues, is to consider what ‘role’ your company has. Where does it fit into your audience’s busy digital lives? How do they use your services? Are you essential to their routine? Having a ‘role’ in your audience’s lives is a valuable first step, a basis upon which to grow.

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Cherry Smyth’s ‘Famished’ – a collection of poems focused on the famine – was performed at Kilkenny Arts Festival last week, with singer Lauren Kinsella and composer Ed Bennett. Toner Quinn reviews.

Famished, a recent collection of poetry by Cherry Smyth, is a deep road into the Irish famine. Her poems may begin with the 1840s but they travel right up to contemporary politics. Alongside her own writing, she quotes from political commentators down the decades. The poem ‘The Cassock, Each and Every Townland’ is accompanied by a quote from the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle writing around the time of the famine: ‘Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it – by heavens – squelch it.’
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Kilkenny Arts Festival presented the Irish premiere of Ed Bennett’s ‘Song of the Books’ last week, performed by Kate Ellis and Crash Ensemble. Toner Quinn reviews.

Composer Ed Bennett’s new work Song of the Books, which was given its Irish premiere at the Kilkenny Arts festival in Rothe House (16 August), has its origins in a request from the cellist Kate Ellis for a solo piece. That didn’t happen, but she is at the centre of this twenty-minute work for cello, ensemble and electronics, performed with Crash Ensemble.
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