Archive News
Roy at helm as Irish Baroque Orchestra perform Messiah
Date Published: 28-Nov-2012
Handel’s Messiah is a bit like sailing – it never lets you down,” says Roy Goodman, who will be guest conductor when the Irish Baroque Orchestra and Resurgam Choir return to St Nicholas’s Collegiate Church with Handel’s masterpiece on December 8.
English-born Roy is a perfect candidate to conduct Messiah, as he has specialised in the music of the Baroque era.
In fact, he says the invitation from the Irish Baroque Orchestra to conduct Handel, “is taking me back to my roots, to a small Baroque chamber orchestra which was my bread and butter”.
It’s also bringing him to Galway City for the first time, although he has seen more of the county’s coastline than most of us, on a solo sailing trip around Britain and Ireland in 2010. Roy stayed on Inis Mór for three days, where he cycled around the island on a fold-up bike he keeps on the boat, and he enjoyed the Irish music sessions in Tí Joe Watty. He also visited Inishbofin and sailed into Killary Harbour where he had a cup of tea and savoured the views.
Since turning 60 a year ago, he has scaled back on his workload, but before that, he was “a musical workaholic”, performing as a guest conductor with over 120 orchestras and opera companies worldwide from the Berlin Philharmonie to the Royal Albert Hall Proms.
He was also a founder of the Brandenburg Consort in 1975, working with the ensemble until 2001. He was music director of the European Baroque Orchestra from 1989-2004 and co-founded London’s Handel Orchestra in 2001, as well as being principal guest conductor of the Auckland Philharmonia in New Zealand from 2007 until last year.
“I started as a chorister in Kings College, Cambridge – I was a lucky young lad,” he says. That choir performed a lot of 16th and 17th Century music, so his love of Baroque was nurtured from an early age.
As a youngster, he played organ and violin, and studied at the Royal College of Music in London in the late 1960s, at around the same time that the first groups in Europe started playing music from that era on historic instruments.
“It sounded perfect to me, and inspired me enormously,” he says, although when he listened to some of these recordings years later he thought they sounded terrible, he adds with a laugh.
But it was a formative experience. Although Roy has embraced modern instruments when playing music from bygone centuries, learning about them was a vital education, he says.
“You learn what they are able to do and keep it in you inner ear, to [help you] know the parameters of what was possible and not go wildly, extravagantly away from it.”
That’s as true for any era as it is for Baroque, he adds. That interest in historic detail has spanned his career. During the 1980s he directed the Hanover Band for CD recordings in the first ever performances on historic instruments of the complete symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Weber, as well as 14 symphonies by Mendelssohn and 60 symphonies by Haydn.
He came to conducting through performing.
As a young man Roy studied both organ and violin and was awarded a fellowship to the Royal College of Organists. But being an organist, usually playing in churches and recitals, was “a rather lonely” career. The violin was more sociable because he could get involved with orchestras.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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