Old houses, fresh faces, and funky music

It might be the oldest chamber-music festival in Ireland, but Ciara Higgins is giving the Music in Great Irish Houses festival an invigorating edge, writes Arminta Wallace

Of all the words you never expect to hear anyone use to describe the Music in Great Irish Houses Chamber Music Festival, "funky" has to be right up there. I mean, "posh" - yes. White wine on the lawn at half-time, and all that. But where's the funk? Well, the word is used by the festival's newly appointed artistic director, Ciara Higgins, who seems to be approaching the 37-year-old chamber-music institution with the energy of a whirlwind and the determination of a personal stylist.

And it may just be a coincidence, but the photographs of this year's soloists and ensembles tell a similar story, for the faces are all young, hip and sassy.

Higgins's debut programme has added three completely new strands to the festival: a concert series in Dublin city centre for which some tickets will be priced at €5; an education project which will bring percussion workshops to teenagers in Pearse Street and masterclasses to some of Ireland's aspiring young musicians; and pre-concert interviews aimed at giving a glimpse of the off-stage personalities of classical performers.

"The Gallery Gatherings are a kind of mini-festival which have given us the ability to stretch ourselves a little," Higgins says. "To try something a little bit more funky, I suppose. I really feel that nobody should be denied access to classical music - and at €5 a ticket, nobody can say they can't afford to come. It also gives us the chance to do something a little bit different in terms of programming. There's a reason why the Brahms's and the Beethovens are performed so often, of course - it's because that's the great music of the classical canon. But all audiences need to be challenged."

There will be five concerts at the National Gallery of Ireland between June 14th and 17th. "Two of them are collaborations between young Irish and international artists," says Higgins. "My hope is that if even two of these collaborations work out, who knows what that might lead to? And, after all, isn't that what a festival is about - bringing people together to make music, in the hope that something will grow out of it?"

Higgins has paired the Irish accordionist Dermot Dunne with the Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and the Chinese guitarist Xufei Yang with the Irish flautist Emer McDonough.

"Then we have the Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov coming to do a solo recital. He has just recorded Songs of the Labyrinthwith Sting, and he'll be playing some Bach on electric guitar - which just has to be heard to be believed." Gulp. In a good way, presumably? "I've talked to various string players and classical guitarists about it," Higgins says, "and they're all going, 'Wow, I want to be at that concert'. The thing is, Edin has worked with Sting, and that's fantastic in its own way. But he has also worked with the counter-tenor Andreas Scholl and with the Hilliard Ensemble. A musician of that calibre is not going to dumb things down. He's making choices based on artistic merit. Also, I believe he's a very shy man; the whole Sting thing has knocked him for six. So it's not about being a rock-and-roll star. But still." She pauses for breath and grins. "I think it brings rock and roll to the festival."

The final two concerts in the gallery series will feature the percussionist Colin Currie, who will be working with youngsters from the Pearse Street area in a series of workshops during the course of the festival.

"I met him in London a couple of months ago," says Higgins, "and he's extremely cool. He's just breaking down every barrier there is. He did three months with World Vision in Mozambique last year, working with kids in a very impoverished area. And I just think that an artist who can bring music to younger people and who understands the importance of that - that's the kind of artist you want to encourage."

Higgins grew up in Abbeyleix, Co Laois, and says music was always part of her life. "My mum was classically trained, and would have maintained that the musical talent came from her side of the family,but my dad was a terrific trad accordion player, and I have a secret suspicion that that's where it really came from. My earliest childhood memory is of a recording of Peter and the Wolf coming in the door. It was a Reader's Digest recording - a big record, with the tree that they all climbed up spread right across two pages. I was about two, I think." Higgins subsequently studied piano and flute at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

"Gillian Smith and Doris Keogh were marvellous to study with," she says. "But I was never going to be a performer. I decided I wanted to teach, so I did the bachelor-of-music degree in Trinity, which is run in conjunction with the Academy and DIT. I loved it, but at the end of the fourth year I realised that I didn't want to teach after all. I wanted to get into music promotion and management, so I did a postgrad in PR at DIT."

After being involved with the publicity for the Great Irish Houses Festival for many years, here she is, moving and shaking as artistic director of the longest-running chamber-music festival in Ireland. How does she sum up her vision of how the festival should be? "We're very fortunate with our title sponsorship from IIB Bank," she says. "And also, this is the first year that the Arts Council has given us funding - which has made the Gallery Gatherings and the education project possible.

"We've had an 'elitist' tag for a long time - but it doesn't bear any resemblance to reality," she says. "Tickets for Great Irish Houses concerts are priced at €35, or €25 for students. The festival is there for everybody. It's still elitist in the sense that they're small venues in terms of audience capacity, and so it's hard to get into them. But that's all."

The venues are something of a moveable feast as they tend to change from year to year, with various houses - such as Kilruddery, whose magnificent formal gardens form a spectacular backdrop for recitals in the grass-ceilinged Orangerie - hosting music on a regular basis. "We are going to Russborough House for the first time in 15 years," says Higgins. "In fact this is the first year we'll be playing the four provinces, because we're going to the Aula Maxima at NUI Galway, Fota House in Cork, and then of course there's our big coup - the Northern Ireland Parliament Buildings at Stormont." The UK-based Navarra String Quartet will be making rather more melodious music than is usually on offer at Stormont on June 14th with a programme of Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.

But if Higgins had to choose just one concert from her own programme as a highlight, which would it be? She looks stricken. "Oh, God," she says. "The concert I'm really looking forward to - this is terrible, because I'm going to insult everybody else - but it has to be the Pavel Haas Quartet on June 15th at Kilruddery." The young Czech quartet is named after the composer who died at Auschwitz in 1944, and they will close their programme with Haas's second string quartet, From the Monkey Mountains, with percussionist Colin Currie joining the group for the tongue-in-cheek finale. "It's such an exciting work," says Higgins. "Very Shostakovich. Very witty, with some highly meditative moments as well." Add in "funky", and she might be describing the Great Irish Houses festival itself.

• Music in Great Irish Houses opens on June 8. For further details see the website, www.musicgreatirishhouses.com