ArtScape: One of the most dynamic strands of programming for the European Capital of Culture 2005 will be a series of art and design exhibitions, writes Mary Leland.
While the details of Cork 2005's plans are under wraps until March 2nd, it has been confirmed that €100,000 of its budget will be devoted to the James Barry exhibition scheduled for Crawford Municipal Gallery from November 2005 to February 2006. And up at the new Glucksman Gallery at the university, the Victorian architect, William Burges, responsible for St Fin Barre's Cathedral, is to be celebrated in an exhibition springing from the cathedral archives and covering the gothic fantasies of his amazing career. In both cases, help and enthusiasm have been available to Cork from experts and institutions abroad.
Like Burges at the cathedral (although nowhere else), James Barry worked on a massive scale. The Crawford's Peter Murray is hoping to acquire the great Lear and Cordelia from London's Tate Gallery, having carried a manufactured facsimile canvas through the Crawford doors to show that it could be accommodated in Cork.
The aim is to include all Barry's paintings, drawings and prints, borrowing from international institutions and private owners. Gigantic back-lit transparencies will be mounted to reproduce the canvases lining the Great Room at the Royal Society of Arts, while the Crawford itself has Ulysses and Polyphemus, a double portrait of the artist and his first important patron, Edmund Burke.
Complex and argumentative, Barry was the only member ever expelled from the Royal Academy; his controversial views were considered a threat to the political and artistic status quo.
He was born in Cork in 1741, educating himself by copying Raphael engravings. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1771 and although he was later estranged from Burke (and from most people who could help him), his fame as a history painter has never dimmed. When he died in extreme poverty his body lay in state before burial in Westminster Abbey next to another friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He died on February 22nd and on the 200th anniversary of that date, in 2006, the Cork exhibition will conclude with an academic conference, to which some of the world's most respected historians and art theoreticians have been invited.
At the Glucksman the inaugural schedule is expected to reassert the genius and eccentricities of William Burges in a wide-ranging exhibition intended as a reminder of the brilliance of the architect's comprehensive imagination. This stretched from interior design to furniture and decorative items of jewelled metalwork, as well as work in gold and silver.
Back at the Crawford, the Burges show will be rivalled in importance and glamour by the long-heralded display of four centuries of Cork gold and silver. There is a lot of it, and this project, with J.R. Bowen as curator, will be presented in the context of the history of Cork city and county, along with paintings, architecture, furniture and sculpture of the period.
In the meantime, although still enmeshed in negotiations for the proposed loan of works on paper from the Rijksmuseum for 2005, Peter Murray is also hoping to bring an exhibition of antiquities from the Cairo Museum to the Crawford.
Dundalk ACCESS granted
The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will play at the official opening of the newly refurbished Town Hall Theatre in Dundalk next Tuesday, writes Michael Dervan. The refurbishment took place on foot of a grant of €2.5 million received under the ACCESS scheme set up by Síle de Valera when she was minister for arts. In addition to doing up the auditorium and basement gallery, the town council decided to improve the rest of the building as part of a total project costing €10 million.
Along the way, however, the original arts-related refurbishment project changed in character. The theatre, now to be known as the Táin Theatre, where the RTÉCO will play in on Tuesday, will have just 360 seats, as opposed to the 692 of the pre-refurbishment original. It's hard to imagine the consequences for the musical acoustic being other than grave. And the economic consequences for touring opera - Opera Theatre Company visits regularly, and brings its new Turn of the Screw there on Thursday, February 26th - are likely to be pretty serious, too.
There has been an extraordinary pattern whereby the requirements of musical performance have been simply ignored in projects funded under the ACCESS scheme. This is hardly surprising given that the scheme was explained as being designed to assist "the four main categories of arts and cultural infrastructure: arts centres, theatres, galleries and museums", without even a passing mention given to music.
Even the main musical recipient of ACCESS funding, the Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis, has a stage that looks more like a theatre stage than a concert platform, and is acoustically dry enough to seem better designed for amplified music than for the electronically unenhanced performances of traditional and classical musicians.
The reason for the change of heart in Dundalk, where the plans submitted to the ACCESS scheme would have left the auditorium capacity virtually unchanged, has to do with a powerful local interest lobby. It seems that amateur drama groups, unable to fill the venue for their productions, found the idea of separating off the ground floor area somehow beneath their dignity. The musical consequences of their success can be sampled on Tuesday when the RTÉCO, under Proinnsías Ó Duinn, plays a programme of Mendelssohn (Hebrides Overture), Barber (the Adagio), Mozart (the Clarinet Concerto with Michael Seaver) and Beethoven (Symphony No. 4). Booking: 042-9396437.
Chernobyl film nominated
In addition to Jim Sheridan's In America collecting three major Oscar nominations this week, there was Irish interest in the Oscar category for best short documentary, in which one of this year's three nominees is Chernobyl Heart, a collaboration between US independent film-maker Maryann Deleo and Adi Roche's Chernobyl Children's Project, writes Michael Dwyer.
The film prominently features the work of the project and Roche, its executive director. Deleo shot the film over a two-year period in Belarus, the country most seriously contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. She collaborated closely with Roche and her associates, and travelled to Chernobyl-affected regions during 2001 and again in late 2002.
The short film documents the terrible effects of radiation, and the high levels of cancer, birth defects, and heart conditions suffered by the region's children.
Roche expressed her delight at the Oscar nomination: "It is a very great honour for the project to be involved with a documentary that is on the shortlist for the Academy Awards.
"Our sincere hope is that the publicity gained from this great achievement will help to once again highlight the plight of the victims and survivors of the world's worst environmental disaster".
'Lovers' partnership
Limerick's Island Theatre Company and the Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis have joined forces to present a new production of Brian Friel's Lovers.
The production opens at Glór on Monday before going on tour in the Shannon region. This is the first time that Island and Glór have worked together on a co-production and the first time in 15 years that Island has opened a show outside Limerick.
The chairman of Island, Tim O'Brien, welcomed the pooling of resources as "the way forward in the arts" and expressed confidence that it was the start of a long relationship. Katie Verling, director of Glór, pointed out that this is the first time it has hosted the opening of a new theatre production.
There is something of a Friel revival at the moment. As well as Lovers, Aristocrats has just finished at the Abbey and two other Friel plays are in production: Philadelphia, Here I Come, directed by Adrian Dunbar, is currently on tour, and a new Gate Theatre production of Dancing at Lughnasa, directed by Joe Dowling, opens on February 24th. Lovers, which comprises two short, complementary one-act plays, is being directed by Island's artistic director, Terry Devlin.
Following the run at Glór (February 2nd to 7th; box office: 065-6843103), the production tours to Kilworth, Co Cork (February 10th); the Excel Centre, Tipperary (February 13th); Doonbeg, Co Clare (February 14th); Scarriff, Co Clare (February 17th); Listowel, Co Kerry (February 18th and 19th); Kilmallock, Co Limerick (February 20th and 21st); and Limerick's Belltable Arts Centre (February 23rd to 28th; box office: 061-319866).
Organics development
Now in its third year, Music Network's Young Musicwide Award has, for the first time, gone to a jazz group, Organics, the Dublin-based trio of Justin Carroll (organ), John Moriarty (guitar) and Kevin Brady (drums), writes Ray Comiskey. The award means that, over the course of the next three years, Organics will be offered - subject to resources and availability - several concerts each year, including a showcase concert in Dublin, with the possibility of "international performance opportunities".
The group will also get masterclass and workshop opportunities, along with professional support and advice on careers. They will benefit from publicity campaigns connected with the initiative and will have the chance to record a promotional CD. At the end of the three-year award period they will be invited, subject to agreement, to join the overall Music Network programme.
Previous winners of the Young Musicwide Award have come from the classical world: the Callino Quartet, soprano Ailish Tynan and pianist Deborah Kelleher, and clarinettist Carol McGonnell. Organics have a a regular Friday residency in Slatterys, Rathmines, as well as other gigs around the city.