Thomas Adès on Simon Rattle: ‘He really does have a composer’s understanding’
The British composer discusses the inspiration behind his new orchestral work, Aquifer, which gets its Irish premiere next weekend
Samson Tsoy: Clean, eager playing overlooks what’s most important in Beethoven’s final piano sonatas
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The Kazakh pianist projects too much and too readily. None of these sonatas needs such advocacy
Pavel Kolesnikov: A disappointingly egotistical approach to Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The Russian pianist is extraordinarily resourceful, but his style says far too much about him and too little about the composer
Samson Tsoy & Pavel Kolesnikov: Always absorbing take on Rite of Spring sounds as if it’s from a parallel universe
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s work, contrasts are starker and the music’s rhythmic complexities come to the fore
Irish Chamber Orchestra: Deep, detailed performances in a setting that brings out the best in Vaughan Williams’s fantasia
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The programme features Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Errollyn Wallen’s Dances for Orchestra
Emma O’Halloran: ‘Why do all the women die in opera? I really wanted to do something that’s not that’
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In Trade/Mary Motorhead, O’Halloran uses music to explore a transactional relationship between two men and also to transcend the confines of a prison cell
The extraordinary life of a Waterford composer who was the leader of 19th century English opera
In Ireland, as an 18-year-old, he had been organist of Thurles cathedral and also taught at the Ursuline convent there, and he had been a violinist at the Theatre Royal in Dublin
West Cork Chamber Music Festival review: A potent, candlelit reminder of Magdalene inhumanity
Second week featured a resplendent Anna Devin, a Levantine exploration and masterly piano performances
West Cork Chamber Music Festival review: Mesmerising Schubert, achingly beautiful Beethoven and lovely Smetana
The Signum Quartet and the Chiaroscuro Quartet were the weekend’s highlights
Fanny Clamagirand on Beethoven’s violin sonatas: ‘This music is so rich, so intense, so complex’
West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2024: The violinist is teaming up with the pianist Roustem Saitkoulov to play the complete cycle of 10 works
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung at the Lovely Music festival: A clear, confident performance of a relic of its time
The piece Neue Vocalsolisten perform is like a world-ranking tourist attraction that has been so hyped it has little chance of meeting expectations
Robert Ashley’s Crash at the Lovely Music festival: Riveting in a way that leaves you wanting to dive in again
Performance by the astonishingly virtuosic Varispeed Collective is a kind of sensory overload
Labèque sisters: ‘We hear Philip Glass played mechanically. He’s not like that. He’s the last romantic composer of our century’
The celebrated French piano duo talk about the new scores for three Cocteau films they’ll be playing at the NCH
Dublin International Chamber Music Festival 2024: Leonkoro String Quartet give an extraordinary performance
The group’s precise articulation created mesmerising delicacy in their opening piece
‘What a magical, bizarre, tragic way to learn a piece of music’
Highlights of Louth Contemporary Music Society’s Lovely Music Festival include Crash, Robert Ashley’s final opera, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung