Kinsale Arts Week and the Shannon International Music Festival reviewed today.

Kinsale Arts Week

Various venues

Fires lit up the harbour on the first night of Kinsale Arts Week, a glowing beacon against the black water. As the amber light danced across the marina, sparkling reflections shimmered in the sea-bed, drawing crowds of revellers to the harbour walkway like moths to a flame. The spectacular outdoor display, choreographed by Fire on Water, got the week off to a blazing start.

Now in its fourth year, Kinsale Arts Week has expanded on to the streets, with public events providing a core background to the packed programme. Free family activities, music and storytelling schedules are aimed at expanding non-traditional arts audiences, while the clever curation of one particular strand of the intensive visual arts programme provided a welcome surprise for day trippers typically more interested in shopping than celebrating art. Here the shop windows provided a walking gallery tour for the passer-by, and the concept worked especially well on the intimate narrow streets of Kinsale, where kaleidoscopes of colour catch the eye from a distance and draw people up the tiny thoroughfares.

The work, by local artists of varying styles and abilities, sat well among the bric-a-brac offered by the local shopkeepers. The paintings nestled in among the handmade knits, home-made breads and restaurant fronts at the heart of the east Cork town.

Elsewhere, the programme gave rise to more personal than public moments of reflection, as with Jake Oldershaw's magnificent Intimate Histories, a 10-minute theatre performance for one. Here, there are a selection of six performances to choose from, set up on a quirkily designed menu. When your order is placed, your performance is freshly prepared for you, and you are invited into a dark room to take a seat with a stranger (Oldershaw himself, the performer), while the cabaret-style storytelling performance begins.

My starter proved to be a charming and chilling Sweeney Todd-style story of scientific discovery, while my main course was a sweet personal serenade whose heartbreaking ending spoke poignantly to the concept of fleeting connection that is at the core of this innovative, intimate performance. Having originated in Birmingham, the universal appeal to human relationships that Intimate Historiestaps into has become, deservedly, an internationally applauded attraction.

The Neil Jordan Focus events, meanwhile, provided audiences with a rare chance to hear the Irish film-maker speak in person, and in the intimate setting of the Trident Hotel's Harbour Room, overlooking the marina, Jordan discussed his early literary beginnings and his international Hollywood career. Against the dramatic backdrop of Kinsale's layered hills and choppy waters, the public conversation was a fascinating, if vaguely uneasy, meeting of minds. Jordan and his interlocutor, Dermot Healy, were introduced with idiosyncratic panache by writer Aidan Higgins, who lives in the town. Higgins spoke eloquently of his admiration for Jordan the writer over Jordan the film-maker, but many of his comments echoed uncomfortably later on, when Jordan talked about the sense of snobbery that dampened his early achievements as a film-maker, where literary contemporaries felt he had sold out to the lesser art form.

However, Jordan likened his craft as a film-maker to his craft as a writer, specifically of the short story, and he commented ironically that the difference in his interests in the two forms were minimal.

"The work of your imagination is over by the time you are 15 or 16 anyway," he commented wryly. "After that you are revisiting the same themes over and over again, whether that's in a film or a story."

For Jordan, who is currently filming his latest script, Ondine, in the west Cork coastal town of Castletownbere, it is the image of the sea that washes over his work again and again, from his first novel, Night in Tunisia, to the latest, "more autobiographical" Clontarf-set book he is working on. In his short play, White Horses, commissioned for production by Kinsale Arts Week, the image of the sea is particularly prominent, here speaking to the natural erosion of a relationship over time. Directed by Darragh McKeown and performed by Conrad Kemp and Hilary O'Shaughnessy in the Trident Hotel's Chart Room, White Horseswas again poignantly projected against the window-framed natural landscape of the harbour.

Alongside a series of other events set within the special seaside environment (the lively Ska Cubano concert set among the ruins of Charles Fort, for example), the relationship between place and this year's Kinsale Arts Week programme seemed one of studied complementarity.

Kinsale Arts Week continues until Sunday. Programme details on www.kinsaleartsweek.com

SARA KEATING

Shannon International Music Festival

Limerick

As a student I remember being told by a professor in unequivocal terms that Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphoniewas a work so costly to put on that it would never be heard live in Ireland. It had its Irish premiere within a couple of years, and has been heard twice since in Dublin and once in Belfast.

This year, marking the centenary of the composer's birth, accounts for one of those performances, and a complete cycle of the organ music and performances of the great piano cycle, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus(both complete and partial).

Irish interest in Messiaen is still largely focused on works of the 1930s and 1940s rather than the later work. Gerhard Markson has programmed Chronochromieof 1960 with the RTÉ NSO and "Réveil des oiseaux" of 1953 is to come in October. But it would be a daring individual who today would prophesy a timescale for a complete survey of the Catalogue d'Oiseaux, from the mid-1950s, or a performance of Des Canyons aux Étoiles(an Alice Tully commission celebrating the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence, inspired by Utah's natural beauty), or of Messiaen's very late orchestral works.

Joanna MacGregor's approach to 12 of the movements of the Vingt Regardsin a late-night programme at St Mary's Cathedral in Limerick interestingly evoked unexpected contexts for this landmark work, written in 1944 for Yvonne Loriod, who years later would become the composer's wife.

MacGregor allowed a sense of Lisztian bravura into the music, as well as evocations of the gestural language that informed so much serial writing of the 1950s and 1960s. She may not always be the tidiest or even the most accurate of Messiaen players. For instance, she regularised the rhythm of the Regard de la Viergein ways the composer could hardly have approved of. But her playing was utterly persuasive in colouring, and she dared to take the Messiaen at his word when he asks for extreme slowness. She commanded both the raptness and the rapture that can make his contemplations so compelling in terms of intimacy and violence, mysticism and sensuality.

It was unfortunate for the piano improvisations Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin has collected under the title Elver Gleamsto have been performed at lunchtime on the same day and in the same venue as the Messiaen. Ó Súilleabháin has carved out a niche for himself with a choppy, poppy style that integrates elements of traditional Irish music. But he now seems rather trapped by the harmonic blandness he has created, and by allowing his vamping to take the place of clear musical statement.

The performance of Schubert's Octet by members of the Irish Chamber Orchestra (ICO), with guest wind players, was an enjoyable if lopsided affair. In spite of the momentary showing of dark clouds, the Octet is a work of irrepressible good humour. The lopsidedness in this case came from an imbalance within the ensemble, the ICO's artistic director Anthony Marwood (leading from the first violin) and clarinettist Robert Plane showing a strength and depth of musical character which the other players simply didn't match.

There were no such problems in a double Four Seasonsbill, familiar from Gidon Kremer's recording, which combines the ever-popular Vivaldi with the less well-known Las Cuatro Estaciones porteñas, by Argentinian tango king Astor Piazzolla. In terms of the ICO's concert history of the Vivaldi, this performance could be called the musical version, not as in stage musical but in the sense of a direct focus on the music, without the histrionics of the ICO's concerts with Nigel Kennedy.

The interleaving of the Vivaldi and Piazzolla provided a wealth of intriguing contrasts, which were clearly relished by the players on stage as well as by the audience, which listened throughout without venturing any applause, and then at the end rose to its feet in appreciation.

MICHAEL DERVAN