Category: Performing Arts

National Youth Orchestra Summer Proms 2008

From MA alumna Aisling Ennis:

Belmullet to Berne! National Youth Orchestra of Ireland (NYOI) presents

Summer Proms 2008

NYOI Summer Proms 2008 will bring 170 young Irish musicians from the far reaches of Belmullet on the west coast of Ireland, to Bern, the capital of Switzerland. This year NYOI welcomes back two former members Gwendolyn Masin and Clíodhna Ni Aodáin to perform as soloists with NYOI.

Two soloists? That’s right. This summer NYOI is proud to present two touring orchestras. NYOI Junior Orchestra with members aged 12 – 18, and NYOI Symphony Orchestra with members aged 18 – 24.

NYOI Junior Orchestra National tour

Under the baton of Gearóid Grant, and in the electrifying hands of soloist, Gwendolyn Masin NYOI Junior Orchestra present a musical collage of a selection of Bizet’s Carmen Suites, the sonorous tones of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Dvorak’s Symphony no.8.

Their musical adventure begins in Waterford, with a performance in Belmullet, before returning to Dublin to perform at The Helix.

Concert Date & Venue

3rd July 2008 8pm College Street Chapel, Waterford

5th July 2008 8pm Áras Inis Gluaire, Belmullet, Co Mayo

6th July 2008 8pm The Mahony Hall, The Helix, Dublin

NYOI Symphony Orchestra tour to Switzerland

This summer, NYOI Symphony Orchestra is delighted to have been specially invited to perform in a festival of youth ensembles in Switzerland to mark the 150th anniversary of the Bern Conservatory of Music. Under the baton of Atso Almila, and with soloist and former NYOI player, Clíodhna Ní Aodáin, the orchestra will unite with all other youth ensembles in the festival to perform an open-air joint programme in the centre of Bern.

Date & Venue Programme

31st July Interlaken Concert Hall Mussorgsky-Rimsky Night on a Bald Mountain

Schumann Cello Concerto

Scriabin Le Poeme de l’Extase

Pictures are available on request. For more information on the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland please see website www.nyoi.ie or Tel: (01) 6169642/6169638

For further media information contact Aisling at the NYOI office

Tel: (01) 616 9642 Email: marketing@nyoi.ie

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NYOI acknowledges with great appreciation its funders and supporters

The Department of Education and Science, TOYOTA IRELAND,

The Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland and the Musicians Benevolent Fund

NYOI in addition acknowledges the valuable promotional support of

The Irish Times and RTÉ lyric fm

World Street Performance

Kudos to the folks who organised the AIB Street Performance World Championship, held in Merrion Square over the weekend– a great event full of families who were absolutely delighted with the activities on offer, from acrobatics to vaudeville and magic. And special congratulations to ‘The English Gents’, who deservedly walked off with the Grand Prize of the weekend! Click on the image for more photos of the event…

Theatre Forum annual conference: ‘Is it worth it?’

Theatre Forum has announced details of its annual conference on 12-13 June in Cork, which boasts a great line-up and a provocative series of sessions. A full programme can be downloaded here.

Theatre Forum responds to Arts Plan

At the end of last week Tania Banotti of Theatre Forum Ireland published the organisation’s response to the Arts & Culture Plan unveiled by Minister Brennan at the end of February, available on TF’s website and in Friday’s Irish Times. The piece expressed concerns about the purpose of the plan (given that an Arts Council plan is already currently active) and questioned its emphases on economic benefits and symbolic (rather than strategic) gestures:

On closer examination, the Minister’s document is not so much a plan as an extended statement on the current artistic landscape, and the activities of the national cultural institutions (such as the Abbey, the National Concert Hall, National Library, National Gallery and IMMA) in particular. One big question it raises is how much his Department, and by extension the State, values the arts for their intrinsic worth, and how much they see the arts as a social tool or as a plank of cultural tourism. The arts are an important economic contributor, and they can – and do – play an important role in terms of social inclusion. However, the arts are not primarily an instrument of economic or social policy. This can’t be allowed to become their primary function, or the only basis on which they are funded.

While the Minister comes under criticism for the instrumental tenor of his department’s plan, I think it less convincing to counter with the ‘art for art’s sake’ argument. Continue reading →

Everybody Loves Sean

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Writing in Saturday’s Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole weighed in again on the spat between Garry Hynes (of the Druid Theatre) and the Abbey, over a proposed cycle of Sean O’Casey’s three Dublin plays (celebrating the centenary of 1916 in 2016) that’s soured the relationship between them. In an earlier interview with Hynes which appeared in Thursday’s IT, the basis of the dispute was outlined:

According to Hynes, she approached the Abbey’s director Fiach MacConghail in 2006 with the idea of undertaking this project as a co-production. “I approached the Abbey and suggested that this would make an ideal co-production project. The Abbey has resources beyond what we had, and a relationship with the writer. Druid had the expertise and the proven ability to deliver on major projects of this kind and it seemed to me that that was an ideal and potentially very exciting co-production for the two organisations. It seemed to make complete sense to me, but the Abbey rejected the proposal.”

Just before Christmas 2007, according to Hynes, she discovered that the Abbey had in fact gone much further. Druid, which had been in discussion with the O’Casey estate on the rights to the plays, was told quite suddenly that the Abbey had taken the rights to both The Plough and Juno , making the Druid project impossible.

“We were gazumped by the Abbey. It was pretty disturbing. We were in the middle of negotiation. We were very much taken by surprise to find that the Abbey had purchased the rights to two of the plays, therefore making our plans untenable. And they had done that in the full knowledge of our plans.” Abbey director Fiach MacConghail accepts that he had some discussion with Hynes on the O’Casey project, but strongly rejects any suggestion that Druid was “gazumped” (see panel). What is clear, though, is that a potentially very significant project is now impossible and that Hynes’s own relationship with the Abbey, where she was artistic director in the early 1990s, is completely severed as a result.

Continue reading →