Early Music Festival celebrates Time

Time is the theme of this year’s Galway Early Music Festival, which takes place in the City this weekend. Highlights include a cello concert on Saturday at 1pm in St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church.

The Cello goes Baroque, which is being presented in conjunction with Music for Galway, will feature Aoife Nic Athlaoich on baroque cello and Yonit Kosovske on harpsichord.  They will present four sonatas for cello and continuo, featuring works by 18th-century composers Francesco Geminiani, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean Zewalt Triemer and Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

Dublin born Aoife Nic Athlaoich is a musician who is equally happy playing baroque music and newly-commissioned works. She has performed with many period ensembles, including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Irish Baroque Orchestra, and is a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Yonit Kosovske, who lectures in classical music at UL, plays harpsichord, fortepiano, chamber organ and modern piano. She has performed as a soloist and chamber artist in the United States, Israel, Hong Kong, Europe and South America. She has degrees in both modern and historical keyboard instruments.

Tickets for this concert, the final one in Music for Galway’s current Celissimo Season, are €12 / €10 (concession) and can be booked Opus 2, 4 High Street, by phone at Music for Galway, 091 705 962, or on www.musicforgalway.ie

Free events at the Early Music Festival will include a Renaissance Dance Workshop, at the Connacht Tribune Print Works, on Sunday, May 17 at 1.30pm.  Led by members of Seoda, the Galway Early Music dance and music group, this workshop is designed to be informal and relaxed and is open to all – no experience is needed.  Some of the dances being taught are medieval, some are Renaissance, and the group will also dip into France’s traditional heritage. This event will be accompanied by live music.

The Printworks will also host an exhibition, Suspended in Time, featuring ancient Irish instruments. Simon and Maria O’Dwyer of Ancient Music Ireland have curated this show, which will give people a chance to learn more about the great Irish instruments of the first millennium BC. There will also be opportunities to play these horns and trumpets. The instruments will be on view on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 4pm daily and there will be a talk and demonstration on Saturday at 2.30pm

Other concerts taking place during the Early Music Festival include Fragments for the End of Time tomorrow, Saturday, at 8pm, which is an exploration of St John’s Book of Revelations. That is being presented by Sequentia, made up of Benjamin Bagby on voice, harp and lyre and Norbert Rodenkirchen on  medieval flutes and harp.  It’s in An Taibhdhearc at 8pm and tickets are€18.

For more information on the Festival’s events, several of which are free, visit galwayearlymusic.com.