The longtime curator of Kilkenny Arts Festival’s classical strand bade farewell this week with a suitably diverse programme of music
ITS THE end of an era at Kilkenny Arts Festival. Susan Proud, whose involvement goes back 28 years, has decided to call it a day. She was initially a member of the programming committee, and later, when the festival appointed curators for individual programming strands, she took on full responsibility for classical music. Her musical taste was always discriminating, and she always seemed willing to take risks that other festivals and promoters might shun.
Kilkenny Arts Week, as it was originally called, was held for the first time in 1973, in an Ireland with no National Concert Hall, no West Cork Chamber Music Festival, no Music Network, no Crash Ensemble, no Irish Composers’ Collective. In that context, the festival’s music-rich programme made Kilkenny a summer-time Mecca which, at its peak, put on two classical concerts a day, provided an important platform for emerging performers (and, for a while, for composers), and brought all kinds of luminaries to the atmospheric surroundings of St Canice’s Cathedral and the Black Abbey.
Proud’s own fondest memories are of Steven Isserlis’s many visits, especially the first, playing Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Ulster Orchestra in 1986. “Every time he came it was always quite something,” she says. She also mentions flamenco guitarist Paco Peña (“amazing as a player and as a person”), Catalan soprano Victoria de Los Angeles, the stream of early music performers and ensembles (including Jordi Savall, the Gabrieli Consort, the Tallis Scholars, the Hanover Band), and violinists Nigel Kennedy and the late Mark Lubotsky (“for me the best violinist we had here”).
She takes particular pride in the number of performers who made their Irish débuts in Kilkenny, some of whom are still waiting a platform in Dublin. However, her greatest memory is of a 1994 performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor with the Irish Youth Choir under Geoffrey Spratt, with a period-instruments orchestra specially assembled under the leadership of Swiss violinist Maya Homburger, the first Irish performance of that great work to use period instruments.
The classical component at the festival has long since been curtailed from its glory days. The festival chose to expand in other directions with the apparent ambition of rivalling the popular impact of Galway Arts Festival, and it did so not just by building onto what was its core strength, but by pruning the classical programme back in order to push resources into other areas, much to the discomfiture of classical music aficionados.
There were, of course, musical developments around the country which may also have had a crucial influence. It’s possible that the growth of specialised classical festivals in Bantry and Sligo, as well as the development of celebrity concert series in Dublin and the increasing number of visits by international orchestras to the capital set the bar higher than Kilkenny could afford to go.
This year’s first evening concert, by the Irish Youth Choir under Greg Beardsell at the Black Abbey, was a sellout. Beardsell is a charismatic figure who delights in bantering with his audience, and his Kilkenny concert, with his listeners in the L-shaped Black Abbey giving him two angles to attend to, found him in his element – he got his singers to re-form regularly, so that everybody got a fair chance to hear the music face-on.
The Beardsell sound is warm and full and easy. He cultivates a style which makes singing sound entirely uncontrived, and his singers give a palpable sense of the intense pleasure they get from performing. The programme was extremely mixed – Giovanni Gabrieli, Hans Leo Hassler, Haydn and Mozart to Lajos Bárdos, John Tavener, Arvo Pärt, Eric Whitacre (Water Night, conducted by the choir’s conductor in training, Lynsey Callaghan) and a new piece by Jonathan Nangle, to see a landscape as it is when I am not there, a work that’s calculated never to sound the same way twice, as it features pre-recorded singing which is randomly triggered during the performance.
The one weakness in Beardsell’s approach is the way he tends to minimise stylistic differences between composers. Think of actor Seán Connery’s approach to accents – he simply won’t let go of the Scottish tinge – and you’ll know what I mean.
The festival’s closing concert was also choral, the third incarnation of the Kilkenny Arts Festival Choir and Orchestra under Fergus Sheil. Neither Beethoven’s late cantata Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt nor Berlioz’s song-cycle Les nuits dété came into proper focus, but the choir found its footing in Beethoven’s Mass in C – the more assertive the music, the finer the singing became – and the vocal soloists (Róisín O’Grady, Bridget Knowles, James Edwards and Graeme Danby) were a rock of strength.
The week’s offerings included viol music by Marais, Jenkins and Couperin (with Markku Luolajan-
Mikkola and Mikko Perkola, violas da gamba, Eero Palviainen, theorbo) coupled with Eero Hämeenniemi’s Sab Kahân, a new piece bringing those musicians together with Indian vocalist Bombay Jayashri and tabla-player Sai Shravanam, which placed the beautifully intricate singing in the ambience of pop songs.
The other early music offerings included The Golden Age of French Sacred Music (Le Concert Spirituel, beautiful but cool), and rarefied Spanish Songs of the Early Renaissance (La Morra with a pure-voiced Arianna Savall). In the dark winter of Schubert’s Winterreise Dutch baritone Maarten Koningsberger seemed to express himself visually in ways that weren’t always fully captured by his voice. Finghin Collins’s handling of the piano part was altogether more penetrating.
The chamber music highlight was Fauré’s glowing Piano Quartet in C minor played by Ilya Gringolts (violin), Nathan Braude (viola), Torleif Thedéen (cello) and Polina Leschenko (piano).
Two corrections are due in relation to last week’s column. Somehow or other I typed mezzo soprano Doreen Curran’s first name as Noreen. And I credited Oliver Mears as director of NI Opera’s forthcoming production of Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The work will be directed by Antony Macdonald. Apologies on both counts.
