Music in Great Irish Houses kicks off tomorrow at Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. TARA BRADYmeets artistic director Ciara Higgins
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT chamber music. Strip away orchestral adornments and we’re left with the to-and-fro of what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “four rational people conversing” and a sound that demands a tightrope walk between individual articulation and selfless team play.
Nobody could miss a full symphonic orchestra on the horizon but a string quartet has stealthy superpowers. Like wandering Klezmer musicians of yore, a chamber ensemble can sneak virtually unnoticed into a room, raise the roof and disappear off into the night. Immediate and snug, the tight-squeeze chamber experience is as close as it gets to snorting or injecting musical composition; it’s Bach in pill-form; Brahms as a patch.
In this spirit, the KBC Music in Great Irish Houses festival has, for more than 40 years, presented chamber music in its most logical surroundings: in chambers. The intimacy of sound and setting, says artistic director Ciara Higgins, is what it’s all about.
“For me chamber music is the pinnacle,” she says. “It’s a chance to engage with music and musicians on a very close level. You’ll see the artist smoking at the break or having a cup of tea. You’ll see them talking for five or 10 minutes to the kids that come along. This is music in a casual environment surrounded by really beautiful places; the artist isn’t on a higher plane. Last year we were having a picnic at one of our venues and Arabella Steinbacher was sitting beside us having her strawberries.”
Today, Higgins is already mulling over options for the 2012 programme. The KBC Music in Great Irish Houses series and its seasonal neighbour, the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, are special events in the national musical calendar, but around the churches and monuments of mainland Europe, chamber music is in plentiful supply.
“There are amazing festivals all over Europe,” she says. “France on its own could keep you busy. Norway has a major festival around the same time as ours that I’m always sorry to miss. You could literally spend all your time going between chamber-music festivals, and that’s not counting smaller one-off events. I’m hugely passionate about it. I feel it’s a privilege and an honour to do this. It would be wonderful to run these kinds of programmes all over the country all the time. But money does come into it, too.”
So how do places get matched to players and pieces? Is it all about the acoustics?
“Not so much,” she says. “The acoustics are always going to be imperfect. That’s the trade-off you get for getting so close to the artists. We will twist the definition a little to get the best settings. We’re in the Chapel at Trinity College and the Baroque Chapel at Kilmainham, for example. And tone is an issue. Our opening night features music from the Terezín Concentration Camp and we couldn’t have put that on in an opulent house. It just wouldn’t have worked in that kind of space. At the other end of the spectrum we have L’Autre Ebène doing their jazzy film stuff in the Sugar Club. And that’s perfect because they’re hopping and interactive. I guarantee you if you see them you will rush out and buy all their CDs.”
This year, various Great Irish Houses, and a few chapels, will play host to artists such as Vivaldi revivalists La Serenissima, the Grammy-winning Pavel Haas Quartet and the voguish Quatuor Ebène, in locations including Christ Church Cathedral, Kilruddery House and Hillsborough Castle.
“Honestly, every year I get the programme and I’m always amazed,” Higgins laughs. “How did we get that person on this exact date? How did it all fall into place? For me, whether right or wrong, I’m very artist driven, so if I hear someone like L’Autre Ebène in the middle of nowhere in France, and I just know this is something extraordinary, I have to get them. I start off with the people I really respond to – that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be the people other people respond to – but I think that if you’re bringing live music into the country you want the artists that you’ve seen and that you’ve really been blown away by.”
The locations are stunning, the music is otherworldly, but, Higgins notes, the charms of the big house recital are often imperfect. “When we had the 40th anniversary last year all the former programmers got together and we all had the same kinds of stories to tell. Julie Woodward, who had the job before me, once had a concert with a bucket collecting drops of rain coming through this grand old ceiling. I had quad bikes starting up in a nearby field when Artemis Quartet and Valentin Erben were in the middle of a Schubert programme. I promise we won’t have the bikes back. But that’s the thing about Music in Great Irish Houses. It may sound very grand and it may sound very posh and inaccessible. But it’s very real world. That’s why the audiences and artists always want to come again next year.”
The 2011 KBC Music in Great Irish Houses Festival runs from tomorrow until June 19th. See musicgreatirishhouses.com
