ArtScape:Next year's RTÉ Living Music Festival (February 15th-17th) is a celebration of the work of an Estonian, Arvo Pärt, and programmed by a Scotsman, James MacMillan, writes Michael Dervan.
MacMillan sees the festival as "a unique chance for Ireland to gain a probing insight into the mind and work of this iconic musical figure". And Pärt says he's looking forward to his first visit to Ireland, a country "that has managed in an astonishing way to keep its historical, cultural and religious identities until today".
Given Pärt's long preoccupation with choral music, the question on many music lovers' lips has been about where the necessary choirs will come from. With the release of the festival programme details, the answer is now at hand. Two of the choirs are Irish, two from abroad, and the middle day of the festival is given over entirely to choral music. The two concerts on February 16th are both at Christ Church Cathedral. Stephen Layton conducts the leading British choir Polyphony in a programme of Pärt and Poulenc, and Sarah Tenant-Flowers conducts the National Chamber Choir and the Hilliard Ensemble in Pärt's 75-minute Passio.
The opening and closing concerts are both at the National Concert Hall.
Tõnu Kaljuste returns after September's triumphant Irish tour with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir to conduct the RTÉ NSO in the Anish Kapoor-inspired Lamentate for piano (Joanna MacGregor) and orchestra; the RTÉ Philharmonic choir joins the NSO for the Berliner Messe and Credo.
On Sunday, David Brophy is at the helm of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in the earliest of Pärt's works to be included, the Collage on BACH of 1964, along with Tabula Rasa (with violinists Ian Humphries and Darragh Morgan) in a programme that also includes a new work by David Fennessy.
Sunday's other concerts are given by Joanna MacGregor with the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet (coupling Pärt with Ivan Moody and Alfred Schnittke at the National Gallery at 2pm), and the Crash Ensemble (who include Pärt's Stabat Mater with music by Dutch composers Martijn Padding and Peter Adriaansz at TCD's Samuel Beckett Theatre at 5pm).
Pärt has written a new work that will be premiered in Ireland in February, but the performance doesn't fall within the programme of the Living Music Festival. It was Eamonn Quinn's Louth Contemporary Music Society which commissioned The Deer's Cry, a setting of St Patrick's Breastplate, and it will be premiered by the State Choir Latvija under Fergus Sheil in St Peter's Church of Ireland, Drogheda on February 13th. There's a repeat at St Joseph's Church, Dundalk, the following night, and the concerts by the Latvian choir will also include new works by Georg Pelecis, Deirdre McKay and Rihards Dubra.
Pärt will be in Ireland for the February concerts, and, with James MacMillan, will also attend a composition seminar by Ivan Moody at Trinity College Dublin on Sunday February 17th at 11am. Free places for this event can be booked through music@rte.ie, but expect demand to be high.
McPherson's Seafarer stranded With names such as Tom Stoppard, Tracy Letts, Aaron Sorkin and Conor McPherson up in lights, this season's run of straight, serious plays on Broadway promised to be one of the best in years, but the stagehands' union strike, which is now entering its second week and which has closed 27 shows, may already have put paid to that, writes Belinda McKeon.
Straight plays always find it harder to stay afloat on Broadway than big-budget musicals, and every day without a performance further tightens the screws on the finances of a show such as McPherson's The Seafarer, which transferred to New York from the National in London.
And it is McPherson's play, sadly, which stands to lose most from the stagehands' walkout. The playwright may be a darling of the critics, and The Seafarer his third Broadway outing, but his drama of a drunken Christmas Eve card game interrupted by the devil is the smallest of the shows affected by the strike, and consequently the most vulnerable.
The strike, which came after months of negotiation between the union and the League of American Theatres and Producers over pay rises and staffing levels, hit on November 10th, when the McPherson play was beginning press performances. This meant that, even if labour relations had been resolved by its November 15th opening date, the show would likely have had to be postponed. But that resolution still hasn't come, and cast members including Jim Norton, Ciarán Hinds and Conleth Hill are unable to enter the Booth Theatre even to rehearse. McPherson, who is also directing, has been equanimous in the face of this strife, but he has been frank, too, about the psychological challenge such a stoppage represents for cast and crew.
Neither will the case of The Seafarer be helped much by the fact of its Christmas setting, however peripheral and dark-hued that setting may be; on Broadway, the season is the season, and the planned mid-November opening was just right in terms of timing for a show which would need to do well over the holiday period in order to stay open into the spring.
And if it's an ill wind, in the form of Satan himself, that blows through McPherson's play, then another Irish playwright, Newry-born Abbie Spallen, may be feeling some of the benefits of that stiff breeze this week, as her play Pumpgirl prepares to open off-Broadway. The play will be produced, like McPherson's last Broadway run (with Shining City), by the Manhattan Theatre Club, and it seems, too, as though Spallen counts McPherson as an influence; Pumpgirl is a series of three monologues tracing three lonely lives in crisis, set in a modern Irish Border town, and centring on a young woman who works at a gas station. It premiered last year at London's Bush Theatre, and earned Spallen (who is currently under commission by Fishamble) a glowing preview spread in Sunday's New York Times.
Abbey welcomes Navan Man
Playwright Stuart Carolan has been announced as the Abbey Theatre and Anglo Irish Bank 2007 writer-in-association. Carolan first came to prominence via his Last Word radio show creations Navan Man and the Drunken Politician. His debut play was Defender of the Faith - a black comedy about the hunt for an IRA traitor - in the Peacock in 2004.
At the formal announcement in the theatre on Wednesday, Carolan said it was a real honour and that he felt unworthy in the company of previous writers-in-association at the Abbey. He got a great laugh when he talked about the 20-year sponsor of the writer-in-association, Anglo Irish Bank, saying, "people associate writers with being anti-bank. But I think they're a great bank!" Just as Anglo Irish Bank loaned money to people others wouldn't lend to, he said, an entrepreneur goes "out on a limb because they believe in something that others don't believe in".
He talked warmly of the support structure at the Abbey, and described director Fiach MacConghail as "part politician and part alchemist", with a tie, suit and new shoes, but then the flowing hair, like Gandalf or Dumbledore.
Carolan's second play, Empress of India, was produced by Druid Theatre Company and directed by Garry Hynes. After it premiered in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway in 2006 it transferred to the Abbey as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Carolan is currently writing new plays for Druid, The National Theatre in London and the Abbey.
St Ann's Church, Dawson Street, Dublin is the venue for a John Beckett memorial concert tonight. Beckett, a distinguished conductor and harpsichordist and sometime composer, who died in London last February, is most fondly remembered for the Bach cantata series he conducted at St Ann's in the 1970s, writes Michael Dervan. The series was highly regarded abroad as well as at home, and the performances travelled to the BBC Proms in London and the Bruges Festival in Belgium. Beckett used to assemble a choir specially for his concerts, and singers from the original performances will be joining forces again to perform the cantatas - Nos 30 and 150 - which travelled to London and Bruges. The evening will also bring together members of the orchestra he used - the New Irish Chamber Orchestra - although, sadly, none of his original soloists is still active as a performer.
Their places will be taken by Rachel Talbot (soprano), Alison Browner (contralto), Peter Kerr (tenor), and Nigel Williams (bass), and the conductor is David Milne. Students from Beckett's viol consort and chamber music classes will also be performing, and the proceeds of the evening will go to St Ann's, which is this year celebrating its tercentenary.