IT IS GOING to be a year of adventure for the Irish Chamber Orchestra with two visits to Germany, an Irish tour, opera collaboration and another with aerial dance. The company is also platforming a new commission for Dublin’s St Patrick’s Festival. All of these events will take place between February and the middle of May, with details released already in the Orchestra’s Spring programme.
Chief executive Gerry Keenan leads in strategy and principal conductor Jorg Widmann, composer and clarinet player, directs the music.
Consider St Valentine’s week as a start point to performances with Mozart, Mendelssohn and Prokofiev on the cards for Thursday February 15 in St Mary’s Cathedral. This venue with its vaulted ceiling and chandeliers should be amazing for the Russian composer’s Quintet in G minor “full of the jazzy themes of the 20s, inspired by his forgotten circus ballet Trapèze,” observes the ICO’s Charlotte Eglington. “Acrobatic aerial dance specialists, Fidget Feet enhance this unique and spectacularly atmospheric performance.”
On then to Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral on February 16 and over to Leverkusen in Germany on the 17th for this short tour. They return to Heidelberger Fruhling Festival this year in March with the Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja performing Mozart’s Piano Concert No. 23. She and the orchestra will also play Widmann’s own Fever Fantasy, inspired by Schumann.
A week before Heidelberg, the ICO will premier its commission by DJ and producer Kormac, ‘Equivalent Exchange’, arrived at with Loah and Eimear Noone. This time the venue is Vicar Street and the occasion is St Patrick’s Festival, the night of Sunday March 18.
Music buffs, that’s enough excitement to orchestrate for one article. More anon as each of these concerts draws closer.
