Front row

New projects, imagination, innovation, something a "wee bit different" - that's what DECAL, or the Northern Ireland Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure has been asking of the Belfast Arts Council. According to an insider, the Department sees itself as a "lubricant". Because it deals with Irish-language issues and cross-border cultural projects, it sees itself as playing a pivotal role in uniting people under "the common name of Northerner".

Next Monday, the hand of friendship will be stretched across the border to the extent that the Northern Ireland Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Michael McGimpsey, will pay his first official visit to Dublin in his new capacity.

With his counterpart in the Republic, Minister de Valera, he will attend the annual North-South committee meeting of the two arts councils. He will also visit the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where he will attend a dinner with Arts Council members and Minister de Valera.

Co-operation between the arts councils has been going on, officially, for 22 years, and there will be more in the future. For instance, the two councils have been involved in research into how to support the individual artist, and the results will be published next month.

The area of opera is one in which co-operation is envisaged, but a joint opera company is (sadly) not on the agenda at the moment. Apparently, there is also a focus on how the arts are promoted, on an island-wide basis.

In these dead days of January, keep hope alive by thinking of west Cork, spring, summer and music. The West Cork Chamber Music Festival has its origins in a concert series, and this year it is highlighting concerts which take place outside the period of the June festival.

Over Easter, the festival will run a special event, the first performance of the complete cycle of Shostakovich's 15 string quartets - the composition of which spanned the composer's life, from Fascist repression in the 1930s to the last year of his life - and these will be played by the Borodin Quartet at Bantry House. The tickets are selling like scalding cakes.

Then, after the festival on July 28th, violinist Catherine Leonard will mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death with a concert of the D minor and E major Partitas at St James's Church, Durrus.

The festival itself runs from June 24th to July 2nd - so this year there's an extra day to soak up the music. As usual, Francis Humphries's festival is full of surprises. Last year's introduction of 20th-century music has encouraged the programming this year of a concert by the Norwegian virtuoso percussionist, Hans-Kristian Sorensen, who will kick off the festival with Thirteen Drums by the Japanese composer, Maki Ishii. The Vanbrugh String Quartet, the festival's resident players, will play a new composition by the Irish composer, Deirdre Gribbin, and there will be a performance of contemporary music for oboe, horn and harpsichord, including work by the British composer Thomas Ades and John Adams.

Other visiting musicians include Aleksandar Madzar, the Belgrade-born musician who many felt should have won the top prize in the Leeds Piano Competition, who will play Ligeti, and Quirine Viersen, the young Dutch cellist, a recent winner of the Soloist of Europe Prize, who will play from composers including Schnittke and Mozart.

A festival of Fringe theatre, in Limerick, in January . . . Last year we were sceptical, but the Belltable Arts Centre sailed on to success and is repeating the experiment. From January 27th to February 5th, a season of uncompromising novelty will run at the centre, including Bedrock's production of Bernard-Marie Koltes's Night Before the Forest, Rich Hall's Otis Lee Crenshaw show, Linda Marlowe's Edinburgh hit, Berkoff's Women (from the works of Steven Berkoff), and the Welsh Theatr Mwldan/Opera Cocktail production of Mark Ryan's Castradiva, the fictional story of a castrato banned from singing in public in Rome in 1700, which is sung by Buddug Verona-James.

New Irish work includes Foley by Michael West, presented by Corn Exchange. It takes its inspiration from the work of the "Foley" artists, who create the sound-effects for film (apparently, no-one really knows where the name originated, but an Irishman may be at the bottom of it). From this, West went on to think about a man whose life is "out of synch" and this developed into a character who sees himself as the last Protestant in Ireland. It is far more narrative-driven than most of West's work up to now and is acted by Andrew Bennett.

Much as we shudder at the use of the word "Celtic" as a link between Irish and Scottish music - no-one has a bull's notion what the Celts liked to groove to, after all - we thrill at the prospect of the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow. Based in Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, it opened on Tuesday, runs until January 30th and features a breath-taking range of top roots artists including: Dolores Keane with Scottish singers Ishbel Mac Askill and Elspeth Cowie; Altan with Tim O'Brien and Kathy Mattea in an exploration of Irish and American musical links; Mercury-nominated Kate Rusby; and String Sisters, a crew of fiddling ladies including reland's Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, America's Liz Carroll, Cape Breton's Natalie McMaster, Scotland's Catriona MacDonald and Norway's Annbjorg Lien. Anuna play with the Scottish harpist, Savourna Stevenson; the Scottish fusion bands Salsa Celtica and Tequila Mockingbird play together; and June Tabor sings with Scottish singer Margaret Bennett . . . the list goes on and begs the question why no festival of its kind has ever been run here (just imagine it happening in the National Concert Hall).

However, in Glasgow it will act as a link between highland and lowland culture and between Irish and Scottish identities in the city, and a series of seminars on Scottish identity is planned, along with a literary strand, featuring, among other Irish writers, Seamus Heaney.

Lyric Theatre's artistic director, Simon Magill, may claim that Northern voices constitute the bedrock of the theatre's spring programme, but it also includes voices from Dublin, London and Scandinavia. The Lyric hosts the Abbey's production of Brian Friel's Living Quarters from January 31st to February 5th. It will be followed by Tinderbox's premiere of On McQuillan's Hill by Stewart Parker New Writing award-winner, Joseph Crilly. It will open on February 10th and will be Stephen Wright's last outing as the company's artistic director before he joins the BBC as a drama producer.

Patrick Marber's award-winning Dealer's Choice marks Tim Loane's directing debut with a Prime Cut Irish premiere, in which five Cockney poker players take on a game with more than money at stake. Brian Foster is a new local voice, whose first The Butterfly of Killybegs was developed during the Lyric's 1999 Signposts project. It will be directed by Roland Jacquarello, a former artistic director at the theatre. Also in the pipeline are new plays from Marie Jones, Damian Gorman and Michael Harding, as well as Simon Magill's production of A Doll's House, adapted by Frank McGuinness, and, in June, the world premiere of Marching On by the prolific Gary Mitchell.

Meanwhile, there are two new arrivals on the staff - marketing and development director Mary Trainor, currently in charge of marketing at the Grand Opera House, and executive producer John Sheehan. New Yorker Sheehan spent 11 years as founder and artistic director of the Opera Ensemble of New York before moving to Tralee as head of Siamsa Tire. His is a newly created post, combining management and creative roles.

Edited by Victoria White

frontrow@irish-times.ie