Classical Music | News, Interviews, Gigs, & More | The Irish Times

Finnegan Downie Dear: The young English conductor’s lunchtime programme takes the RTÉ Concert Orchestra through three different views of the Orient.

From festivals to summer schools and lunchtime concerts

This week’s best classical concerts

Christian Blackshaw: performing Schubert’s piano sonatas at Kilkenny Arts Festival

Schubert dip and Caesar salad: Classical and opera treats this week

Schubert: Dreaming the Sublime, Giulio Cesare, and Rediscovering Irish State Musick

John Harris: arriving into a situation in which future festival themes and commissions are already in train

The new director of New Music Dublin has his work cut out for him

The experience of the festival has been like that of a child of warring parents

Sharon Carty as Amy in The Second Violinist which had its world premiere on July 27th as part of the 40th Galway International Arts Festival. Photograph: Patrick Redmond

Opera on the line – a play with music or an opera?

Donnacha Dennehy’s The Second Violinist, with a libretto by Enda Walsh, takes the phone in opera fully into the 21st century

Veronica Dunne: Ireland’s most influential singing teacher. Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons

The best classical performances to see this week

Russian fare and a 90th birthday celebration for Veronica Dunne

Frank McNamara was genial, resolute and even-handed as a task-master – and encouraging as a teacher. Photograph: Jason Clarke

Frank McNamara gives a masterclass in how to handle mistakes

The pianist shows students how to handle the pressure of improvisation

Donnacha Dennehy’s The Second Violinist, his second opera with writer and director Enda Walsh, premieres at the Galway Arts Festival

The best classical performances to see this week

Dublin International Piano Festival, opera at the Galway Arts Festival and 37th Chamber Music Festival in Castletownshend

German organist Ansgar Wallenhorst is such a fan that he included no less than three improvisations in his recital at St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire, on Sunday

Making music as a spontaneous, unpremeditated act

Many great composers were also great improvisers, Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner among them

Mezzo soprano Tara Erraught, with the RTÉ NSO/Gavin Maloney, at the NCH, Dublin, on Friday

The best classical performances to see this week

Irish mezzo soprano Tara Erraught comes to the National Concert Hall

German-Korean violinist Viviane Hagner

The unpredictable magic of the new encounter

West Cork Chamber Music Festival director Francis Humphreys struck gold this year bringing together violinist Viviane Hagner, cellist Johannes Moser and pianist Barry Douglas

Karen Ní Bhroin, who will make her debut with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra on Tuesday.

The best classical music concerts in Ireland this week

Giya Kancheli miniatures get an airing while Karen Ní Bhroin makes her RTÉ NSO debut

English pianist Julius Drake: expressive vehemence

West Cork Chamber Music Festival gets the Hollywood treatment

Composer Hanns Eisler wrote the `Hollywood Songbook' while in enforced exile from Germany

Fergus Sheil speaking after picking up the best opera award at this year’s Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, for The Barber of Seville by Wide Open Opera. Photograph: Cyril Byrne

Arts Council announces new opera company

Opera Theatre Company and Wide Open Opera will merge to form new entity

Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino gives the impression of re-drawing time. Photograph: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

The maverick who declared electronic music rubbish

Despite denouncing Stockhausen as a charlatan, Brian Boydell was no traditionalist. And Salvatore Sciarrino at Silenzio further cements Louth Contemporary Music Festival’s reputation

Cellist Norah O’Leary from Ensemble Dagda with students from St Brendan’s NS Bantry at the launch of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry, Co Cork. Photograph: Darragh Kane

Getting to know you: From Billie Holiday to the airport blues

Ahead of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, five string players discuss their work

Wide Open Opera and Landmark Productions have won the€150,000 Fedora General Prize for Opera for their production of ‘The Second Violinist’. Photograph: Hugh O’Conor

Irish opera picking up international awards as Arts Council decision imminent

Smart money still on the Wide Open Opera/Opera Theatre Company bid to become the council’s new major opera supplier

Nathalie Stutzmann, RTÉ NSO’s principal guest conductor, conducts five concerts in the 2017-2018 season. Photograph: Simon Fowler

Early music – and earlier start times – for RTÉ NSO’s new season

Orchestra celebrates 70th anniversary with a wide-ranging concert programme

When it came to concerts, the late conductor Neville Marriner put the soloist as the number one consideration, then the repertoire, then the conductor and then the orchestra

Who comes first: the conductor, the composer, or the orchestra?

Striking the right balance between all the factors at play in a concert, and their effect on audience numbers, is an artform in itself

Chamber Choir Ireland

‘I thought music college would be like Fame, with people hanging from chandeliers’

From his earliest days in a rock band to his years in music college, David Fennessy realised he would be composing music rather than performing the works of others

Handel’s Radamisto: The music-making, with David Brophy conducting the Irish Chamber Orchestra, was strong, sturdy but also a little stiff

NI Opera's ‘Radamisto’ by Handel: great music, shame about the plot

Russian composers shine at NCH; Tenebrae revisit Orthodox choral music

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