With just over a week to go before East Cork Early Music Festival 2014, Artistic Director Marja Gaynor has written a message to get you as excited about next week’s festival as we are:
A warm welcome to the 12th East Cork Early Music Festival!
Timeless music, fresh approach:
It’s an ironic aspect of the Early Music Movement that, despite all its immersion in long past musical worlds, it is quite a young affair, no older than the twentieth century, and not really established until the radical and rebellious 1960s and 1970s. Early Music is bizarrely youthful, and this year’s festival aims to celebrate that paradoxical character by exploring the tension between youth and experience – the fact that the vitality of a movement or tradition is directly linked to its capacity to at once admit the new and care for what is achieved.
No tradition, in other words, flourishes or survives without its ‘custodians’, those who have mastered the canon, and passed on and modified the achievements of the past. But it is also true that tradition becomes stiff and stuffy without the generational influx of new attitudes, new perspectives. That might seem straightforward enough, but what’s most exciting about the tension between ‘youth’ and ‘experience’ is that it may very well occur in the same person, or couple for that matter. The couple I am referring to is the celebrated Homburger / Guy Duo: Maya and Barry somehow manage to be masters and rebels in the same package, effortlessly blending old and new, never compromising on the quality or power of either. Their opening concert sets the tone for what’s to follow: one of the great hymns of the Early Medieval Church counterpointing the 17th century violin fireworks of Heinrich Biber, all seamlessly combined in a programme that includes Guy’s own homage to Samuel Beckett. They will be joined for the evening concert on the same Thursday evening by other members of Camerata Kilkenny in an all-Bach programme.
Friday’s evening concert takes things even further. For the eagerly awaited return of our own Cork Baroque Orchestra, we have teamed the young enthusiastic band with one of the world’s most successful and respected Baroque violinists, Elizabeth Wallfisch, and alongside the canonical Vivaldi, Telemann and Schmelzer, we will hear a brand new, previously unheard piece for Baroque strings – the winning composition of our competition ‘Passamezzo Nuevo’. On Friday afternoon the paedogogic relation of experience to youth will be showcased, with a concert featuring students tutored in an open masterclass the same morning by Canadian cellist Elinor Frey and theorbist Esteban La Rotta, who will also perform.
Saturday is dedicated to youth, but in the Marian Consort, one of the UK’s leading vocal ensembles, we are safe in the hands of a group wholly at home in their gorgeous Spanish Renaissance material. Special guests on the night will be the choir of St Aloysious’ College, the young voices of East Cork’s future. Midleton’s atmospheric and historical St John’s Church will play host to this concert, as it will for the lunchtime concert on the same day, when we will welcome back from London the brilliant Cork School of Music graduate, recorder player Caoimhe de Paor. Her talent will be pooled in a delightful 17th century programme with the wide experience of James Taylor, harpsichordist, organist and director of the award-winning Madrigal 75.
As 2014 is the 450th anniversary of the Bard’s birth, and so much fantastic music, old and new, has been inspired by Shakespeare’s immortal works, it seemed fitting to include the great man in this year’s line-up. Keeping to this year’s theme, we have teamed the venerable Will with Cork’s youngsters, and commissioned The Gregory Walkers to present a Shakespeare extravaganza suitable for the whole family. The four members of this new Irish super-group are not only Early Music virtuosos but also real musical polyglots and genre-hoppers, and have already gained much praise for their imaginative programming for young audiences.
Top all this up with a late night gig by Adrian Crowley, accompanied by Baroque strings, as well as a Festival Club (judging by last year’s, it’ll be very cool indeed!), the return of the Early Music Flash Mob to the streets of the county and city, open masterclasses, the Lillibulero Trio’s hugely popular school concerts … And of course the ever-important element of all of us lovers of Early Music gathering for four magical days, meeting at concerts, rehearsals, coffee breaks, the inevitable post-concert pints … Professionals, students, volunteers, music-lovers, friends, passers-by who get roped in: playing, listening, learning, chatting, debating, keeping things alive, moving things on, maintaining the tradition, keeping it young.
