Early Music Fest steps out in style with A Song and a Dance

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

A Song and a Dance is the theme of this year’s Galway Early Music Festival, which will run from Friday to Monday May 24-26, with the spotlight firmly on medieval, renaissance and baroque music, dance and song.

In a three-day programme of concerts, talks, dance workshops and exhibitions, the music will range from Baroque Spanish and Portuguese dance music to medieval French dancing songs.

Highlights will include a concert with Irish mezzo-soprano Sharon Carty performing her programme Suitcase Arias. This is being co-presented with Music for Galway. Joined by a five-piece baroque ensemble led by Claire Duff, she will perform Suitcase Arias or Arie di Baule, so called because famous singers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries brought them with them on their travels. Such arias were regularly ‘inserted’ into operas as party pieces by other composers or into pasticcios with the work of several composers.

Obsidienne et Compagnie from France will explore the medieval dancing songs of that country.

The UK group, The York Waits, promise to raise the roof with historic instruments, such as shawms, curtals, sackbuts, recorders and pipes, while The Gregory Walkers from Ireland will join forces with US dancer Kelsey Schuhle to create a tuneful mixture, in a show of Baroque and traditional music and dance from Ireland, England, France and Spain.

Yonit Kosovske, Vlad Smishkewych, Redmond O’Toole and dancer Yovanna Torres Blanco from Ireland promise a flamboyant show with baroque Spanish and Portuguese song and dance.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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