Midwinter Festival shines light on Irish composer
Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) will be the focus of Music for Galway’s annual Midwinter Festival, which takes place from Friday to Sunday, January 21-23, in the Town Hall Theatre and St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church.
This event will celebrate one of Ireland’s greatest composers who was also a highly influential professor of composition in London in the early 20th century.
Over the festival weekend, some of his finest vocal and chamber works will be performed, alongside music that was written by composers who influenced him as well as those he taught and nurtured. Two films will be screened, offering a further exploration of the Dubliner and his legacy.
Music for Galway's Artistic Director Finghin Collins has been a Stanford fan since childhood and, in 2010, gave the first performance at the BBC Proms of Stanford’s Second Piano Concerto.
Finghin has invited a selection of world-class musicians to Galway to perform the festival programme, which he’s curated.
"It will be fascinating to immerse ourselves in this rich period of musical history,” Finghin said. “Stanford’s legacy is enormous.”
That legacy includes a musical output which “ranges from large-scale orchestral and chamber works to exquisite miniature songs”. And then there were the pupils he influenced, many of whom subsequently went on to become renowned composers.
“They include Frank Bridge, William Hurlstone, Rebecca Clarke, Muriel Herbert and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,” says Finghin.
Irish musicians will take centre stage at the festival, with mezzo-soprano Sharon Carty and clarinettist John Finucane sharing top billing alongside Finghin himself and Galway’s ConTempo Quartet.
The main concerts will juxtapose intimate songs and chamber pieces with larger chamber works for string quartet, clarinet quintet and a mixed nonet.
The afternoon choral concert at St Nicholas Collegiate Church on Saturday, January 22, will feature the Collegium Choir conducted by Mark Duley. Tenor soloist Christopher Bowen will perform choral works by Stanford and several of his pupils, including a substantial extract from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.
The composer’s biographer and chairman of the Stanford Society Jeremy Dibble will travel from England to give a series of talks about Stanford and his legacy.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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