On The Town: It's a picture of cultured gentility: a spacious, elegant salon, chamber musicians in performance, a music-loving audience. Showing no signs of diminuendo in its 36th year, the Music in Great Irish Houses Festival launched its programme with an elegant lunch in a room with a view at the top of IIB Bank, festival sponsor.
Pianist Hugh Tinney said he "consciously avoided a central theme" to this year's line-up, unlike his past five years as artistic director, "apart from putting together some damn good concerts". While celebrating the Mozart and Shostakovich anniversaries this year, the programme emphasises piano performance, with Finnish pianist Antti Siirala and John O'Conor both presenting work.
"This festival is very special in Irish life," O'Conor said. "It's an opportunity to experience what it was like to enjoy music in these houses. It wouldn't have happened 50 years ago."
After the festival, which takes place in June, O'Conor will continue his high-octane international touring and will begin recording Beethoven's piano concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra next January.
"The rooms in these houses are very helpful acoustically. It's an intimate setting," said Irish guitarist John Feeley, who will perform a joint concert with Paraguayan guitarist Berta Rojas. He will play Spanish music, Bach and guitar arrangements of traditional Irish music, "which is quite technically demanding".
Board member Kieran Tobin, of sponsor Wyndham Estate winery, was delighted with "Hugh's wonderful programme", as was festival administrator Laurie Cearr, who was also co-founder of the Dublin International Piano competition 20 years ago. This year, she is particularly looking forward to the Contempo Quartet with clarinettist Emma Johnson. Pianist Dearbhla Brosnan and Sheila de Courcy, children's programmer at RTÉ, were also keen for the festival to begin.
Lord Meath was looking forward to hosting two concerts at Kilruddery House this year. His wife, Lady Meath, a singer with the Bray Choral society, explained that she loved music because it is "so soothing, good for the nerves". So that explains the peaceful yet congenial atmosphere of the launch, a taste of the many concerts to come.
High-risk strategy pays off in Galway
Theatre director Mikel Murfi was fired with energy at the opening night of Druid's new production in Galway this week. Murfi, who directed the world premiere of The Walworth Farce, by Enda Walsh, was delighted with the warm response the play received, even though it is, he acknowledged, "a difficult piece for an audience. There are so many things going on, it opens your head".
"It's a good high-risk strategy to say to an audience, 'we are going to show you something which will ask a lot of you'," Murfi added. He had another reason to be happy, having learned that Trad, by Mark Doherty, which he directed for the 2004 Galway Arts Festival, had won an award at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia, where it had been playing the previous week.
Freshly returned from Down Under were the current director of Galway Arts Festival, Paul Fahy, and his immediate predecessor, Rose Parkinson. In fact, it was difficult to keep track of the number of former festival directors at the first night, including Trish Forde (accompanied by music promoter husband Padraic Boran), and Ted Turton (with his wife, Lali Morris, director of the Baboró Children's Festival).
Also there was Ollie Jennings, the festival's first director, who recently claimed that the event had lost touch with local artists and announced that a new festival will be held this summer with these people in mind.
One person who looked relaxed was Druid's artistic director, Garry Hynes. Hynes, who never sits through a first night of anything she herself has directed, was in the audience for The Walworth Farce and lauded Murfi for the "great job he did on Enda's play".
The playwright himself was keen to scotch the rumour that he comes from Cork. He didn't know how it started - maybe from the days when he worked with Corcadorca Theatre Company. However, although he loved Cork people, especially "the arrogance and strength of character" he had to confess to being a Dub. - Judy Murphy
Inspiration of a novel kind
So tell me, I asked writer Catherine Daly, what is this French Affair that your eponymous novel is based on? No, it's nothing like that, she assured me.
"I was inspired by our house in France," she explained. She buckled down last June and wrote the book in a couple of months. Husband Denis Daly is waiting to give up the day job any day now, but said, "I'm still paying into the pension plan".
Artist Des Fox knows Catherine through her husband, "Denis the Dentist", whose practice is in Rathfarnham. Fox's landscape painting is inspired by the west of Ireland. In fact, there was no shortage of inspiration in the room. Novelist Martina Murphy, whose latest bookWish Upon a Star was launched last month, is to appear as Helena in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and her acting has a great impact on her writing.
"You can tell by her dialogue," enthused colleague Tracey Culleton. For more inspiration, Culleton's website, www.unleash-the-writer.com, suggests ways to circumvent writers' block. Author Marita Conlon-McKenna took time out from her next novel, The Hat Shop in the Corner, to attend. Also there was novelist Marisa Mackle, who met Daly through the latter's website for women writers, www.writeon-irishgirls.com. Mackle's inspiration came from her previous incarnation as an air hostess, where she frightened Maeve Binchy from a deep sleep in order to talk to her.
"I spent the rest of the night apologising," she recalled. "That was less than five years ago, and to think that she's given me a story for my upcoming book."
Her Party Animal is a story collection, with proceeds going to animal charities.
Odes to interculturalism
Being a teenager can be lonely enough without feeling marginalised as a minority. Perhaps that's why the Schools Against Racism Poetry Competition has been one of the most successful elements of Intercultural Week. According to the director of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), Philip Watt, "we received more than 700 entries - it seems to have struck a chord with young people".
"Ireland is changing, and everyone should be included," said Fiona Reid (15), winner of the junior category. Her poem, Dear Diary, drew its inspiration primarily from her music class at Loreto Secondary School in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, where she enjoyed listening to spirituals from the American Deep South.
The winner of the senior category, 16-year-old Sophie Bowles, from St Aloysius College in Carrigtwohill, Co Cork, employed symbolism in her poem, Night Man, in which a worker in an all-night garage muses about the moon in the dark sky.
Fourteen-year-old Kerri Ward, from Assumption Secondary School in Walkinstown, Dublin 12, won the special mention award with her poem, Silk Sari.
"I write all the time - poetry, short stories, and I wrote a novel when I was little," she said. She loves the fact that her school is intercultural, she added. "There are girls from the Philippines, China, Africa, Poland and Lithuania." Last year, she had mutual language lessons with two Polish girls and she also "learned Japanese off a computer disk - I've always been fascinated by Japanese culture".
The competition results, said one of the judges, poet Colette Nic Aodha, showed that "young people do think deeply about the subject" of racism. She and her fellow judges, poets Paula Meehan and Tope Omonyi, were "very impressed" by the calibre of work submitted.
"I'm very interested in the aims of the competition, to promote anti-racism and intercultural awareness, especially among schoolchildren," said Nic Aodha. "We have to look to the future and encourage ideals."