Reliving magical moments

What were the artistic highlights of 2006? A variety of people share their most memorable cultural experiences with Kate Holmquist.

Teresa Barrett, civil servant

I attend about 100 performances a year. I spend all my money on arts events and books. I've been going to performances for as long as I can remember. I grew up in west Cork and my first concert was Bagatelle when I was 18. I loved the whole buzz of it. It's a beautiful feeling to attend a performance - for me it's the shared experience that is special. I go on my own - even to London, though sometimes I buy several tickets and bring friends. I heard Bruce Springsteen four times this year at the Point. He's an awesome force of nature on a different level to most performers and I see it as a privilege to experience him.

Faith Healer at the Gate was a fantastic performance, bringing Brian Friel back to his own world. I saw it three times. Kevin Spacey gave a towering performance in the Old Vic, London, in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Jazz pianist Brad Meldhau with his new trio at Vicar Street in February was fabulous. His final number, a rendition of The Very Thought of You, was just gorgeous. Sinatra at the Palladium in London, with film of him on screens, was as close as we will get to a live performance. And Kurt Elling at the Cork Jazz Festival had a version of In a Wee Small House of Many that was absolutely exquisite.

The Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire was wonderful purely for the fact that the whole continuum of poetry from the best poets in the world was available in a small venue, making poetry so accessible. Seamus Heaney reading in the Abbey was also a memorable experience, My favourite books were The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury), and three 9/11 books.

While the great 9/11 book is yet to be written, I enjoyed Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (Picador), Jay McInerney's The Good Life (Bloomsbury) and John Updike's The Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton) because they dared to tackle the subject in a very readable way. Sandy Welch's TV adaptation of Jane Eyre (BBC DVD released in January 2007) made me read the book again. I had always thought of it as a book for 13- and 14-year-old girls so this gave me the opportunity to see it anew from an adult perspective.

Philomena Byrne, head of public affairs, Irish Museum of Modern Art

The production by Opera Nationale de Lyon of Tchaikovsy's Mazeppa, directed by Peter Stein at the Edinburgh International Festival, was thrilling in a way I have never experienced opera before. The combination of the music and the theatrical experience, set in the time of Peter the Great, with a wonderful love story . . . The ruler of the Ukraine - who is about 60 - falls in love with the 19-year-old daughter of a feudal lord, who is outraged and reports the ruler to the tzar, and then ends up in prison. It had everything - the personal, the political, the army, the aristocracy the peasants and even two live horses on stage yet it was not overdone. That's the great thing about Peter Stein.

He is always in control of all these forces and four hours of opera go by and you wouldn't even feel it. He can be experimental without losing the overall picture. In the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Schaubuhne am Lehner Platz, with director Thomas Ostermeier did a brilliant updating of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler on a revolving stage with a mirror. Hedda Gabler was a spoiled, destructive young woman who laid waste to everyone around her and came to her own destruction - the revolving stage and mirror meant that at the moment she shoots herself and falls spread-eagled, she is already being removed off-stage and you see the world of the drawing room gradually coming back into focus, going on without her. It's a tale for our era.

The refurbishment of the Hugh Lane Dublin Municipal Gallery is a triumph in the way it was integrated into the existing spaces yet works as a whole. Pat Scott's meditation paintings in the Taylor Gallery (May and June) are done in gold and silver, almost like something from another civilisation, such as ancient Egypt. Longford (Channel 4, October), was about the relationship between Lord Longford (Jim Broadbent) and Myra Hindley (Samantha Morton) and the various dilemmas this threw up for him. I loved Martin Amis's novel, House of Meetings (Cape, €23.63).

Brian D'Arcy, passionist priest and author

Amsterdam has a sleazy ring to it. That's why I wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible and asked the attendant at the tourist guide shelter: what's the quickest way to see the highlights? She suggested a tour of the canals and added, "there's a special this month on the Van Gogh museum". I opted for that as the most interesting way to while away the day before heading to the airport and safety. The afternoon became, quite literally, a life-changing experience.

I had never seen an original Van Gogh, but for the next four hours I was lost in awe of the beauty and the pain in a struggling soul like the rejected Van Gogh. I never knew he attempted over 35 self-portraits and recorded his diminishing self-image with cruel accuracy. He also tried to portray his favourite parable over and over again. In The Parable of the Sower he foretold that he would be a failure during his own life but that the seeds sown by him (and by us as well?) would bear fruit in future generations. Slowly it dawned on me that my task is to sow seeds and leave the rest to God.

Later I sat at a concert given by Kimmie Rhodes, the insightful Texas songwriter, and her latest collaborator Newry singer Kieran Goss. The venue was a disused church in Co Down, where the Brontë family lived and worshipped. The seats are still the church pews and severe-looking models of preachers and former worshippers are dotted around the church keeping a stern eye on the audience. Kimmie and Kieran took the pulpit and "serviced" us with their inspired sermons on life, love, peace and happiness. Poets, artists and musicians are grappling successfully with, and making sense of our haphazard lives.

Twelve fellow pilgrims with haphazard lives joined me to climb a mountain in Donegal last July. We intended climbing the mountain to "find God" because, as the scriptures constantly remind us, that is where God becomes visible.

God's voice is in the clouds. It was a brilliant summer's morning as we started upwards. By the time we reached the summit of the highest cliff in Europe, the scene was breathtaking. Then rain came suddenly and God's voice from the clouds was not as consoling as I would have wished. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future. But we did offer Mass in the rain and it was one of the most meaningful Eucharists I ever shared.

We had an equally enjoyable gathering round the table of the lord in Dom's of Donegal in the evening.

When John McGahern died, I read and re-read his memoir. No other book came close in the last 12 months though theologian James Mackey's mind-blowing Christianity and Creation was the only book to keep me awake at night. I understand only a fraction of it, but a fraction is all I need.

Kevin Gildea, actor, writer and comedian

One of my highlights occurred in the small music room at the back of Matt Molloy's pub down in Westport in June. I was down doing a programme called The 7 Wonders of Westport and after an interview with Matt he recommended a group playing that evening. It is not often an event surpasses its recommendation but this was one. I squeezed into the packed room midway through the gig. A harpist who plays regularly with the Chieftains plucked alongside a Canadian guitarist and flautist (I think) and step dancers (Jean Butler's sister and a couple of Canadian guys) danced sitting, standing, sideways - their feet like percussive instruments on the hard wood floor.

This was music that blew away the cobwebs of category, music that took you by the hand and spun you around. I could taste the erect hairs on the back of my neck because my smile was that big! This group did not (then) have a name and the only name I have is Triona Marshall, which is possibly the name of the harpist! But no matter; when music goes like this it is beyond names.

A final reccomendation is my sister Anne Gildea's book, Deadlines and D***heads (O'Brien Press, €12.99), set in Celtic Tiger media Dublin. I am not just saying that because she is my sister (that would be a silly reason to like a book!) but because it made me laugh more than any other book this year.

One of the best pieces of television I've seen in the last few years was The Path to 9/11, an American dramatisation (in the style of Syriana) of the events that led to 9/11, starring Harvey Keitel. Awesome.

Jack Healy, advertising art director, part-time lecturer in DIT, guitarist with the alternative rock band, j-healy

The Willy Clancy Summer School was amazing. For me, getting involved in traditional Irish music sounds like a contradiction in terms, but having grown up in Milltown Malbay, Co Clare, maybe it was inevitable. I'm a diver and scuba diving off the west coast and traditional music go hand-in-hand because the Clare coast has the best diving in Europe and the divers all go to the pubs in the evening to listen to music. I call it western seaboard culture.

Diving is a kind of art in the way it takes you into a different environment away from mobile phones and TV - you escape into huge isolation and quiet, which is like putting your conscious creative mind to bed for a while. You see places that no other human has set eyes on before - it's a complete relaxant.

YouTube has had an influence on my work because all the latest developments and concepts are there. If I'm creating an ad for a mobile phone or a car or an alcoholic beverage and think hot air balloon dangling a bicycle, I look up YouTube and find a lot of trash, but also some vital art and videos, which helps my creative process.

It's important to stay ahead of trends because by the time an ad appears, it still has to be fresh. The only film for me this year was The Proposition from Nick Cave, who wrote the script, the screenplay and the music. It was well-shot in the outback of Australia with strong characters, a thriller structure and love, death, murder, gunfights, bloodshed, treachery and lies amid an amazing landscape. You could feel the heat off the screen. David Cowzer's high-octane novel, A Matter of Life and Death (Six Degrees West) brought together a silver-spoon Killiney rich kid and a guy from a deprived area of Dublin who discover a drugs stash in a car tyre and take on the crime-lords against a background of the World Cup. What more could you ask for?