IT is a year and a half now since Micheal O Suilleabhain's River of Sound was on our screens, and almost as long since its celebration in public concert at the University of Limerick. Next week the Toyota Performing Arts
Initiative, who finance Prof O Suilleabhain's Irish World Music Centre there, shifts "the river" metaphor to the west with Sionna, which promises to be a stimulating and imaginative international music festival.
For director Mags O'Sullivan the title was as much designed to fit comfortably over the average tongue as to be evocative of the Co Cavan aquatic wanderer.
Primarily Sionna is an effort at making an impact in Limerick city, establishing the Toyota fund's presence at the end of its first of five years of £100,000 a year sponsorship. Pursuing this, she approached Queens University Belfast's director of Electronic and Computer Music Studies, Michael Alcorn, to compose for a fragmented orchestra. The result will be Friday lunchtime's Caoine performance by the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the City Gallery which mixes audience and players, music scattered in solos and ensembles in interconnected rooms.
Equally challenging is American Stephen Scott's "bowed piano ensemble" on Friday night. It reverses the process of technological music advancement by locating 10 players with various kinds of bowing device around a nine-foot grand piano. In the same concert on Friday night Evelyn Glennie joins the ICO for the premiere of La Jalousie Taciturne by Gerald Barry. Barry, of course, is almost local flavour, from nearby Clarecastle himself, and nephew of concertina guru the late Paddy Murphy of Kilmaley, Co Clare.
Interesting, too, should be UCC music department's performance of central Javanese music, the test-drive, so to speak, of director Mel Mercier's new gamelan, a complex multi-person Indonesian instrument.
Looking beyond and over the shoulder, indeed, is an important part of this festival, and so the opening event is a dance night in the Potato Market marquee featuring the specially-commissioned Terry Moylan set-dance The Limerick Tumblers. Mercier's Pulsus idiophone and drum ensemble appear in the same venue on Saturday night with Tumbaito, a Central America Jazz-Salsa fusion big-band, and the modestly-titled Ghanaian star Captain Yaba's blend of traditional, African highlife, reggae and soul. The comic song trio The Nualas M.C. this night, GameIan and salsa workshops pad out Sionna on Saturday, Evelyn Glennie gives a workshop in public and will be interviewed at the Belltable where Micheal O Suilleabhain does Parkinson.