Philadelphia-born Sarah Cunningham's love of early music has led her to start a new annual festival in East Cork, writes Michael Dervan
It's some 15 years since a reviewer in Gramophone magazine described Sarah Cunningham as "probably the finest viol player in Britain today". That the claim no longer holds true has nothing to do with Sarah Cunningham's playing, simply with the fact that the Philadelphia-born virtuoso has long since relocated to Ireland. Last year, she sprung a new festival on the world- not in West Cork, where she now lives, but at the other end of the county, where, as artistic director, she masterminded the first East Cork Early Music Festival.
You might well wonder what brought someone who studied piano and cello in Philadelphia to the field of early music in the first place rather than chasing after a coveted place in that most svelte of US musical institutions, the Philadelphia Orchestra. The early music connection was a family one. Her parents had received a harpsichord as a wedding present, and built up a collection of early instruments around it. "They still have an antique harpsichord which was found in a shop in Paris in the late 1940s," says Cunningham. "They went on collecting things, got recorders. They had viols by the time I was 12, so I learned the bass and played in the family consort. I always enjoyed it, but I never took it that seriously, or dreamed about doing it professionally until I left home.
"I went to college in Boston, to Harvard, but I didn't last long in university. This was 1969 and we were all in revolt. Boston was already a hotbed of early music. I found a wonderful viol teacher, Gian Lyman Silbiger, and suddenly all sorts of playing opportunities opened up. I dropped both the cello and my academic career like hot potatoes, and went straight for it."
From Boston she moved to the Netherlands, where she spent a year studying under Wieland Kuijken, "and hooked up with all sorts of people for chamber music", before heading back to Boston. Curiously, she says, her early passions were for renaissance and medieval music, rather than the baroque music with which she's now so closely associated. The gravitation towards the baroque she describes as "a commercial reality" and says also that it was probably affected "by the people I just happened to hook up with". And she has no regrets. "If you know what's gone before, then you can approach the slightly later repertoire in a different way. You have that consort music feeling, that sense about polyphony and so on, when you come up to the baroque, rather than what you would have just coming back to it from later stuff."
SHE WAS ON tour in Italy when she made the next decisive career move. "It was the beginning of the 1980s, when I met Monica Huggett. We'd both been playing in an opera orchestra, and I'd been a bit discontented and lost. She said, 'Oh well. Move to London.' And I did. Just like that. And I never looked back, really. It was great. It was very good for me to be a smaller fish in a bigger pond. There was all that recording going on through the Eighties, which we all really took advantage of. It was a good move."
The move to Ireland seems to have been equally precipitate. "That took me quite by surprise as well. It was after I had just spent a decade of so much touring. And in addition, there was the teaching job that I had in Germany. I was living in London, and going every other week to Bremen to teach. When I wasn't doing that I was usually going somewhere else for a concert. It was rarely that I was on the ground for two weeks at a stretch. And it takes it out of you in the end." She had toured and recorded Bach with James Galway, which she found "a wonderful musical experience, that meeting of and crossing of styles" - the concerts, she says, were in the end better than the CDs that came out of the collaboration, because the meeting of minds developed the more they worked together. And the work was, as she puts it, "tremendously well paid". That, she says, was "what made me able to build my house in Ireland. I found I was quitting my teaching job, leaving all sorts of groups. I suppose it was a mid-life something or other, and I thought I was leaving the whole profession behind."
She still does a bit of performing abroad. "I do go off and do a couple of tours a year, some things in the States, where I also teach at several courses. I'm enjoying my nice slow pace of life.
"I played in the Sligo Early Music Festival for the last five years. That's always great fun. The atmosphere is lovely and the audiences are great, and we get to do programmes that we want to do. So, not last year, but the year before, I came back from Sligo thinking maybe I could organise a few concerts in Cork. I wasn't thinking of a festival at the time. I went to see Ian McDonagh, who's the Cork County arts officer. He's a great gift to the area, fosters and really supports people doing things. He said, sure, here's some money, do a festival, do it in East Cork. I live in West Cork, so it's a couple of hours' drive down the road. But I think he was right. East Cork is where the good venues are, and they don't really have anything else - in West Cork there's the Bantry festival. There turned out to be a little handful of people in East Cork, Douglas Gunn, Liz Jones and a few others who are incredibly keen, so I've got this whole team that suddenly materialised. I'm not the best admin person in the world. Last year we all just kind of worked like stink, and it got off the ground beyond what I ever could have imagined. This year it's been for me, like, 'Oh, do I have to?' Which has actually been quite good, because it means that the rest of the committee has taken on so much of the responsibility. It's not just me holding the whole thing together now."
HER AMBITIONS FOR the festival, she says, are quite simple, really, "just to have it be really good, top quality, and to have programming such that we can be building up the local audience and also attracting early music fans from all over. We do have people coming from England and a few from America, already in the second year." One of her ideas is to have one of Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos each year, since, "for a general audience and specialist people alike, you can't get better". This year, Camerata Kilkenny play the Fourth, with its grouping of recorder and violin soloists. There's also a commemoration of the tercentenary of the death of Biber through a programme of his remarkable Mystery Sonatas, which require the violin to be tuned in a myriad of unusual ways (Camerata Kilkenny with violinist Maya Homburger), and there's a programme of songs and harp music from the Ireland of the 17th and 18th centuries from sean nós singer Bríd Ní Mhaoilchiaráin and harpist Siobhán Armstrong, playing a wire-strung Irish harp. A group of chamber soloists from the Irish Baroque Orchestra offer a mixed programme of Vivaldi, Telemann, Zelenka and Bach, and the Palladian Ensemble give the opening concert of "Myth and Magic" as expressed through "The Symphonie de Danse at the French Court". This year's events are in Cloyne, Midleton, Youghal, and Cobh. Plans are already afoot for a first visit to Cork city next year, marking Cork's term as European Capital of Culture through a programme of cantatas with Emma Kirkby, and a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers.
The development of early music in Ireland, says Cunningham, is "a couple of decades behind everywhere else. But, having said that, very promising. Just because there are such a generous couple of handfuls of good young players. Of course, the ones who are really giving themselves to specialising in it are not living here, because there's not the work for them. But they're always really anxious to come back. I suppose that is also one of my ambitions for this festival, to be building up the opportunities for early music performers here, so that they will be able to have the work and have the support."
The East Cork Early Music Festival opens next Wednesday. Booking: 021-463 6761 www.eastcorkearlymusic.ie