GALWAY EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL: SOCIAL HARMONY – WHEN TRADITION AND HIGH ART MEET:Various venues, Galway Thurs 18th-Sun 20th
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Beethoven and Haydn, among others, made arrangements of traditional music. In some of their most popular works, Brahms, Liszt and Dvorak took their material from folk culture. This year’s Galway Early Music Festival looks at what was happening rather earlier, “when tunes played at a peasant’s wedding find their way into the music played at a castle feast, when hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes become the fashion at court and when baroque harp discovers the rhythms of Africa and the New World”.
Galway’s Cois Cladaigh Chamber Choir, celebrating their 30th anniversary, give the opening concert at St Nicholas Collegiate Church on Thursday. François Lazarevitch and Les Musiciens de Saint- Julien explore 1,000 years of the bagpipe in France and The Shepherd Poet in two concerts on April 18th. The Harp Consort of Andrew Lawrence-King (left) are the main act on April 19th, And, for April 20th’s late afternoon, closing concerts (5pm/ 6pm) at Aughnanure Castle in Oughterard, Coracle will draw listeners into “the ‘cosmic’ or shamanic music of Gaelic culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance”.
MICHAEL DERVAN
