Marking International Women’s Day 8 March in association with Finding a Voice

In association with Finding a Voice Festival, the acclaimed Banbha Quartet marks International Women’s Day with a programme of fine music by women composers from the past three centuries.

Now in her 80th year and honoured with this year’s NCH Lifetime Achievement Award, Jane O’Leary wrote Mystic Play of Shadows in 1995 at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. It was inspired by the birdsong around the lake at dusk and Jane regards it as ‘one of my very favourite pieces’.

Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova is a composer of ‘exciting, deeply moving’ music (Washington Times), with ‘glowing tonal harmonies’ (The Strad). Her lovely 2019 Smile of the Flamboyant Wings contrasts relaxed, playful and tuneful music with a more introverted central section.

Henriëtte Bosmans was a celebrated Dutch pianist and composer. Her string quartet dates from 1927 and is based around a beautiful lament, full of hazy, atmospheric colours.

Emilie Mayer was a highly regarded and prolific German composer, a contemporary of Mendelssohn who wrote eight symphonies and a considerable body of chamber music. Her music fell into obscurity after her death and has only been re-discovered in recent years. This quartet is in the traditional classical four movements and features a lovely slow movement and an exciting, highly charged finale.

Banbha Quartet
Lidia Jewloszewicz-Clarke, violin
Maria Ryan, violin
Robin Panter, viola
Peggy Nolan, cello

About the Quartet

The Banbha Quartet was founded in 2020 and is made up of four of our most celebrated musicians. They return for their sixth tour for the National String Quartet Foundation in spring 2026.

Lidia Jewloszewicz-Clarke, violin

Lidia Jewloszewicz-Clarke is an award-winning Polish violinist living in Ireland. She is a winner of the Hibernian Orchestra Concerto Competition (Ireland) and the Gdańsk Mozart Prize (Poland). She was a founding member of the Lupus Piano Trio, with whom she received the Special Prize at the International Brahms Competition in Gdańsk, and was a finalist of the Bacewicz International Chamber Music Competition in Łódź. Lidia is the recipient of a scholarship from the President of the University of Music in Luzern, Switzerland and an Artistic Scholarship from the President of Gdańsk for Special Achievements in Music and Culture. Most recently, Lidia was awarded an Agility Award and a bursary by The Arts Council in Ireland.

Lidia regularly performs with Camerata Ireland, Musici Ireland, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra. Lidia graduated with honours from the Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk. She furthered her studies in London at The Royal Academy of Music and graduated with an MA in Performance. Her teachers included Remus Azoiței, Sebastian Hamann, Tomotada Soh and Mirosława Pawlak.

Maria Ryan, violin

Award winning Irish violinist Maria Ryan returned to Kilkenny in 2019 after spending ten years performing and touring from London, UK. Maria is a member of the Banbha Quartet, formed in 2020, supported by The National String Quartet Foundation. She also teaches at the MTU Cork School of Music. Maria enjoyed an eclectic mix of orchestral performing in London, from Symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, to performing at the Proms with The Jacksons and enjoys performing regularly with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Camerata Ireland, and Musici Ireland.

Maria was the winner of the Heineken Violin Competition in 2010, and winner of the Aileen Gore Cup and RDS Music Bursary in 2008. She was a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award in 2021, and was recently awarded the Kilkenny Arts Office EDI Bursary in 2024, striving to make classical music more accessible.

Maria is grateful to the wonderful teachers she had the good fortune to study with, including Philip Edmondson, Maeve Broderick, Geraldine O’ Grady and Ruxandra Petcu-Colan, and Emilian Piedicuta.

Maria currently plays on a Roger Hansell violin and a bow from the renowned Irish bow maker Noel Burke, supported by the Music Network Music Capital Scheme, the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport, and The Arts Council.

Robin Panter, viola

Robin Panter is from Liverpool and studied the viola at the Royal Northern College of Music with Roger Benedict and Scott Dickinson. Robin joined the viola section of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2004, and while in Glasgow teamed up with a group of musicians to set up the Scottish version of El Sistema, visiting Venezuela and applying its ground-breaking social and community development programme to schools in Raploch, Stirling.

Robin now lives in Ireland where he is a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra and performs with the RTÉ Concert, National Symphony and Ulster Orchestras. Robin is a keen chamber musician and is a member of the Robinson Panoramic Quartet, and more recently Trio Táin with his wife Vourneen Ryan (Flute) and Aisling Ennis (Harp). Robin is a trained Suzuki violin teacher and teaches the viola at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.

Peggy Nolan, cello

Peggy enjoys a varied performance career playing with ensembles of all shapes and sizes. As cellist of the Eblana String Trio she has performed in widely since 2006 across the UK, Ireland and further afield. In 2021 the trio released their album, ‘The King’s Alchemist’ to critical acclaim. The album was selected as chamber CD of month in a 5-star review in BBC music magazine and praised for its “splendidly stylish and affectionate performance” (Gramophone). Their second album of string trios by William Alwyn, JB McEwen and Gordon Jacob will be released in 2025.

Peggy is a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, and frequently performs with other ensembles including Manchester Collective and Royal Northern Sinfonia. She can frequently be heard in collaboration with a diverse array of musicians, including recent performances at the Edinburgh International, Cheltenham, Órtús and Killaloe Chamber Music and Celtic Connections Festivals. Peggy is also the cellist of Amika, a string quartet who fuse the craft of chamber music with contemporary techniques and approaches. Amika have collaborated with Jordan Rakei, Rob Luft, Alice Zawadzki, Natalie Williams and Tom Walker, with live performances bringing them to the Manchester, London, and Cambridge Jazz festivals, as well as broadcasts from BBC Maida Vale, Abbey Road and Metropolis Studios and a full-length album Recurring (Live at Kings Place) with Alfa Mist.

Teaching is an important strand of Peggy’s work, and she holds cello tutor positions at both the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Royal Irish Academy of Music. In addition, she teaches for Arco, a distance-learning project in collaboration which provides string teaching to students in South Africa and India. Peggy is the Course Director of ConCorda Chamber music course, and is studying for a PhD in Performance at the Royal Northern College of Music, researching Boccherinian performance practice and creating new recordings and editions of Boccherini’s little- known op.24 and 44 string quartets.

Programme
Jane O’Leary – Mystic Play of Shadows [1995]
Dobrinka Tabakova – The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings [2019]
Henriëtte Bosmans – String Quartet [1927]
Emilie Mayer – String Quartet in G minor [c.1840-1850]