This programme will open with a short violin duet based on Romanian folk songs, written in 1950 by the Hungarian composer Ligeti, followed by an evocative and exciting quartet by contemporary Corkonian composer Finola Merivale. These two collections of miniatures will be presented alongside Mendelssohn’s sparklingly exuberant and rarely-performed string octet. Consisting of four movements and written when the composer was just sixteen years of age, Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major was the first of its kind for eight string players, artfully marrying the intimacy of a chamber music formation with the fuller sound world of symphonic strings.

Musicians:

Mairéad Hickey, Diane Daly, Maria Ryan, Clíodhna Ryan – Violin
Tríona Milne, Beth McNinch – Viola
Christopher Marwood, Aoife Burke – Cello

Programme:

György Ligeti – Baladă şi joc (Ballad and Dance) for Two Violins
Finola Merivale – The Language of Mountains is Rain: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
Mendelssohn – Octet for Strings in E-Flat Major, Op. 20

As a soloist, Mairéad Hickey has performed with the RTÉ National Symphony and Concert Orchestras, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Orchestre de Bordeaux Aquitaine, Kremerata Baltica, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Camerata Ireland and with conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach. Her Carnegie Hall debut was described as ‘…magical, penetrating to the heart and soul of the music.’ (New York Epoch Times)

Mairéad was concertmaster of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire from 2021 to 2023. She frequently performs as guest concertmaster in orchestras across Europe.

A passionate chamber musician, Mairéad has performed with Sir András Schiff, Barry Douglas, Tabea Zimmermann, Renaud Capuçon, Steven Isserlis, Christian Tetzlaff, Alain Altinoglu, Kirill Gerstein, and the Vanbrugh Quartet. She has performed at festivals around the world including West Cork, Clandeboye, Rheingau, Colmar, Gstaad, Grachtenfestival Amsterdam and Kronberg. She is the co-founder and co-artistic director of the Ortús Chamber Music Festival in Cork.

Mairéad was Irish NCH Young Musician of the Year 2010–2012. She won third prize at the 2016 Louis Spohr Competition and the Hoffmann prize at the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad 2022. Mairéad began playing the violin with Jyrki Pietila. She studied with Adrian Petcu at the Cork School of Music, Constantin Serban and at Kronberg Academy with Mihaela Martin.

Mairéad plays a 1702 Giovanni Tononi violin.

Diane Daly is in demand as a chamber musician, director and improvisor at home and abroad. She enjoys devising her own work, and has been invited to perform world premieres of works by leading Irish composers including Sam Perkin, Linda Buckley and Deirdre Gribbin. In other genres she has performed and recorded alongside many of the biggest names in rock and leads her own gypsy jazz trio.

Passionate about education, her teaching focus is on the development of the whole musician as a creative artist, fostering joy-filled music making, autonomy and self-expression. She is a qualified Dalcroze Eurhythmics teacher and recently became Europe’s first accredited string playing Body-Mapper.

In 2022, her doctoral research was awarded the inaugural Aloys Fleischmann prize for outstanding practice based research, developing the concepts of embodiment, presence, creativity and connection in string playing.

Diane is currently Head of Strings at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

An award-winning violinist and native of Kilkenny, Maria Ryan is a member of the Banbha Quartet, supported by the National String Quartet Foundation, and the Marble Collective, as well as performing in duo partnerships with Ciara Moroney and Dr Gabriela Mayer.

In 2010, Maria moved to London to lead Southbank Sinfonia; there she was chosen to perform in their chamber music showcase at Wigmore Hall. Over the following ten years, Maria worked with some of the UK’s most prestigious orchestras, performing all over the world from Carnegie Hall, New York to the Philharmonic Grand Hall, St Petersburg.

Maria was awarded the RDS Music Bursary, an Arts Council Agility Award and was winner of the Heineken Violin Competition. She studied at the CIT Cork School of Music with Ruxandra Petcu-Colan and subsequently at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne with Emilian Piedicuta.

Maria teaches violin at the MTU Cork School of Music, and currently plays on a Roger Hansell violin.

Clíodhna Ryan enjoys a diverse career as a violinist. As a member of the Rothko String Trio, she made her London debut to critical acclaim at the Purcell Room in 2005. She has given world premieres of works by Donnacha Dennehy, Gerald Barry, Ian Wilson and Linda Buckley amongst others, and has performed with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Chroma, Crash Ensemble and s t a r g a z e. She is a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra and is frequently engaged as principal violinist with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra. Her education has taken her from the Royal Academy of Music in London to Dallas as a Fulbright Scholar and she has spent two winters as an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada.

In 2008, Clíodhna co-founded the ground-breaking Kaleidoscope music salon, which she co-curated and presented until 2013.

In December 2021, she launched the podcast Bittersweet Symphony, which she produced, edited and hosted. She has scripted and produced radio segments for Culture File, produced a Culture File Debate and has presented The Purple Vespertine on RTÉ Lyric FM. Her writing has been published in the Irish Independent, on the RTÉ website, and she is the classical music columnist for The Goo music magazine.

Tríona Milne is a viola player based in London. She is part of the rich tapestry of music-making in the city, often hopping from a film session to a chamber music rehearsal to an orchestral project. Recently she has played with the Kanneh-Mason family, performing The Trout. She has performed live with Arcade Fire and recorded with Stormzy and Jacob Collier at Abbey Road Studios. She is a member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who perform all over the world, although her touring schedule is currently on hold with the arrival of her baby girl, Maeve.

Beth McNinch ARAM studied viola at the GSMD and RAM in London, continuing with a successful freelance career, performing with all major symphony orchestras in the UK, including the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra. She has appeared as principal violist with English National Ballet, London Sinfonietta, Wexford Festival Opera, Irish National Opera, RTÉ National Symphony and Concert Orchestras and the Ulster Orchestra. Beth has commissioned five new works for solo viola including a new concerto for viola and chamber ensemble “Earthrise” by Liam Bates, to be released on the Metier label later this year, recorded with Musici Ireland.

Beth formed acclaimed Irish chamber collective, Musici Ireland, in 2012. They are one of the most respected chamber ensembles in Ireland and their performances can be heard regularly on RTÉ Lyric FM and across the EBU. Musici enjoy collaborating with composers, dancers, artists and poets, exploring new and interesting ways of presenting classical music. Beth’s work with Musici includes creating original multidisciplinary works, including critically-acclaimed “A Mother’s Voice”, about the mother and baby home scandal in Ireland during the 1900s, which has been performed in Luxembourg, Germany, America and across Ireland.

Christopher Marwood graduated from Cambridge University in 1983 and went on to study at London’s Royal Academy of Music and Conservatorium Maastricht. His cello teachers included Florence Hooton, David Strange, Ralph Kirshbaum, William Pleeth and Radu Aldulescu. His chamber music mentor for many years was Emmanuel Hurwitz.

He moved to Ireland with the Vanbrugh Quartet in 1986 to take up the group’s appointment as resident quartet to RTÉ, and from its base in Cork the quartet enjoyed a busy career for more than thirty years, performing throughout Ireland and touring worldwide. The Vanbrugh Quartet released thirty CDs including the complete Beethoven quartets (“fine enough to bear comparison with any set” Fanfare, USA) and built up a considerable repertoire including at least sixty Irish works, many of them commissions or premieres. The Quartet’s contribution to music in Ireland was formally recognized in 2016 when they were presented with the National Concert Hall’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Christopher co-founded the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in 1996 and remains director of the Festival’s masterclass programme. He is director of the National String Quartet Foundation (nsqf.ie) and teaches at MTU Cork School of Music and at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He continues to perform both as soloist and as chamber musician, his recent CD of works by Boris Tchaikovsky was nominated for the 2019 International Classical Music Awards.

Cork native cellist Aoife Burke leads a diverse career as a recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral player, curator and producer. Selected by the Arts Council as a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Bursary 2020, Aoife is a member of the Banbha String Quartet, supported by the National String Quartet Foundation.

An avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with The Vanbrugh, ConTempo String Quartet and the Gavin Bryars, Kirkos, Ficino and Crash Ensembles. Her love for chamber music was fostered, in tandem with many other influences, during a Chamber Studio mentorship with Richard Lester at King’s Place, London. Aoife has also appeared as soloist with orchestra several times both at home and abroad. Her début with the New York Concerti Sinfonietta in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 2016 was described as “a thing of beauty…intelligent, poised, and refined” (The Epoch Times).

Recent highlights include performances as part of Cellissimo, Clandeboye and West Wicklow Festivals, as well as playing sixty-three sold-out shows to critical acclaim as an onstage cellist in the Almeida Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Yaël Farber and starring James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan, which was subsequently broadcast on BBC4 Television.