While this may be a time of relaxation when holidays are in full sway, for those involved with the Kilkenny Arts Festival that runs from August 8 to 18, it means a particularly busy period.
The principal feature of the 2024 festival will be a short opera and monodrama by Emma O’Halloran, Trade and Mary Motorhead, which Irish National Opera presents at the Watergate Theatre at 7pm on Thursday August 8, Friday 9 and Saturday 10 and at 3pm on Sunday 11.
The pieces have already been staged in New York and Los Angeles with the LA Times commenting “rarely, if ever, does every element – score, text, singers, instrumentalists, conductor, director, sets, costumes, lighting, sound design – all come together. This is a rarity”.
The libretti come from plays by Mark O’Halloran, Emma’s uncle, and deal with damaged yet compelling characters and finding the woman in Mary Motorhead (mezzo Naomi Louisa O’Connell) serving a life sentence for murder and exploring the disappointments and betrayal that shaped her life. In Trade, two men meet in a Dublin hotel and find themselves drawn into the most unexpected encounter of their lives.
The resident Carducci String Quartet makes two lunchtime appearances in St John’s Priory. The first on August 9 has Beethoven’s Op 95 and Shostakovich’s 8th separated by Philip Glass’s 2nd Quartet, Company. The programme for lunchtime, August 10, is devoted to Mozart’s Hunt Quartet K 458 and Fanny Mendelssohn’s E flat major Quartet.
St Canice’s Cathedral is the late evening setting for Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Drone Mass, which brings Chamber Choir Ireland and Crash Ensemble together on August 10. Despite its title, the work has nothing to do with a setting of the Mass but is ‘a mysterious and richly textured work inspired by an ancient Egyptian Coptic hymn that weaves voices, strings and electronics into a mesmerising soundscape’.
There is also an unusual element in Bassekou Kouyate’s programme in the Set Theatre on Saturday evening August 10. He plays the ngoni – a four-stringed kind of lute – and will be joined by his wife, singer Amy Sacko, and accompanied by his band Ngoni Ba. Kilkenny organisers tell us “The band exemplifies Kouyate’s fresh approach to tradition, effortlessly blending Malian sounds with Cuban rhythms, rock and blues”.
The Carducci Quartet’s late evening concert on Sunday August 11 in the Set has a contemporary stamp with music by Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov and Steve Reich – his Different Trains. Inspired by the pleasant trips he undertook across the US as a boy, they contrast with very different journeys being undertaken at the same time by some European locomotives. Different Trains weaves together live performance with recorded voices from Holocaust survivors into a deeply moving work.
Finghin Collins returns to the festival for a lunchtime recital of Chopin and Schumann on August 13. He is being joined by Máire Carroll on Wednesday 14 afternoon, also at St John’s Priory, for something of a piano marathon – the fifteen pieces commissioned by the New Ross Piano Festival over the years to celebrate the Ros Tapestry that now lodges in Kilkenny.