"One week ago today, I was in Afghanistan, near the front," BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane told the crowd gathered in the sunshine in the Rose Garden at Kilkenny Castle. City dowagers wandered around the bubbling fountain and the trees shifted politely in the breeze as Keane told of seeing a teacher encouraging her pupils to draw on the ground with coloured chalk, in a story that might have made Norman Rockwell blush. It certainly seemed Keane had come a long way to officially open the city's 24th Arts festival but - said the man who had just been introduced as "writer, correspondent and humanitarian" - a "golden thread" connected the two places: a desire to give witness to the beauty of art. Well, it might not see the BBC journalist clear to a job at Artforum magazine, but the observation seemed to satisfy the needs of the occasion.
Kilkenny's Arts Week, as usual, makes little effort to chase the masses. Classical music and visual arts are its mainstays. A book in the local shops may bear the title 600 Years Of Theatre In Kilkenny, but there is none listed in the bumper-size Arts Week catalogue. Rock, pop and dance, meanwhile, are confined to a roster of pub acts in the fringe. Kilkenny, it seems, is happy in its role as the stateliest of Irish festivals.
While Keane officially launched the festival yesterday afternoon, for the art pack the real opening was on Saturday. As is traditional at Kilkenny, gallery hacks, critics, collectors, Arts Council folk and even artists marched through the streets from gallery to gallery, listening to breathlessly laudatory speeches and draining glasses of mineral water and ruby plonk.
In the cool, white rooms of Butler House, a show by shaven-headed Catherine Hearne has covered the wall with hundreds of small, wax-filled frames in which a range of objects, from pins and needles to fur, lace and religious objects, has been embedded. A little lower on Patrick Street, in the tiny jewellery gallery of Rudolf Heltzel, Katharine West has installed her flowing clay sculptures. The guests at these two openings will have found themselves outside Rinuccini's Italian restaurant just in time for lunch. Indeed, after such an exhausting morning, a good plate of risotto marinara was the only way anybody could find the energy to march onwards to the day's three further openings, from sculptor Eilis O'Connell, painter Ray Atkins and painter Hughie O'Donoghue: besides, Kilkenny's mayor, Margaret Tynan, had said this year's festival had an Italian theme.
O'Connell and Atkins took Kilkenny Castle between them, the Irishwoman's metal, linen, plastic and wood sculptures filling the long sequence of underground rooms at the Butler Gallery, and a retrospective of the Cornish plein air work of Atkins the long gallery. Here, according to Observer art critic William Feaver, the glass roof gave a light very similar to that which the artist might have met in Cornwall as he carried his massive paintings-boards around the county's fields and tin mines.
While O'Connell and Atkins showed at a venue which has long been the centrepiece of the historic city, Hughie O'Donoghue offered the first show in a brand new space - a space so new, indeed, that a small crew was still sweeping the final remnants of the venue's construction work together just hours before the opening. O'Donoghue's Via Crucis, a small series of paintings, drawings and prints on a massive, even ecclesiastical scale, is the inaugural show in the James O'Donoghue and Co Gallery, a disarmingly chic white cubespace hidden away down a narrow medieval laneway. The first full evening concert, in the traditional festival venue of St Canice's Cathedral, had the Orchestra of St John's, Smith Square in London teaming up with the mass voices of the Belfast Philharmonic Choir. As usual in the cathedral, the performers had to vie for stardom with the flower arrangements - great pillars of white lilies linked long, fragrant, floral chains. Ambience is everything at St Canice's. The site is free of such hindrances to contemplation as a refreshments bar, but for most an interval walk around the graveyard made an acceptable substitute, as well as offering an experience that seems at least of emblematic of Kilkenny Arts Week as anything that happens in a church or gallery.
Kilkenny Arts Week runs until August 24th. Events include concerts from: The Mondriaan String Quartet (today); Bruno Canino (tomorrow); Aontas (Wednesday); RTE Concert Orchestra (Thursday); Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra (Friday); John Elwes and Hugh Tinney (Saturday); and Concerto Italiano (Sunday). Those giving readings at Bewley's include: TUUP and Aubrey Bryan (Wednesday); Mark Roper and Kerry Hardie (Thursday); Gareth O'Callaghan and others take part in the Poolbeg Crime Night (Friday); while Dermot Healy reads on Saturday. Also on Saturday, Kate Cruise-O'Brien will hold a workshop in Butler House.
For information, tel: 056-63663; or box office 056-52175
