‘Heavenly’ music from Beethoven a lunchtime treat

The Galway Music Residency’s Lunchtimes with ConTempo series will continue next Tuesday, April 3, at 1.10pm in the city’s St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church.

The series is entitled Beethoven – Rage & Mystery and it focuses on the mature quartets by the great composer.  Concerts take place on the first Tuesday of every month at St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church and will conclude in June.

Next Tuesday, the ConTempo Quartet will perform Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132. This great work composed in five movements was written in October 1825 and was dedicated to Count Nikolai Galitzin, the Russian aristocrat and amateur musician who commissioned it.

Some people credit the quartet as being the inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s poetry series The Four Quartets, and with justification.

The poet described this piece of music as “quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die”.

Admission to Tuesday’s concert is free and open to all. Early arrival is recommended. For further information, go to thegalwaymusicresidency.ie.