The legendary RTE Con Tempo Quartet, the Irish Guitar Quartet and the Esposito Quartet are amongst the sublime quartets who will astound audiences at the Clifden Arts Festival with their elegant beauty of sound and moving clarity of texture. The festival, which takes place from the 13th-24th of September 2017, features an eclectic, diverse repertoire of events and promises to enchant and educate people of all ages.
On Saturday the 16th of September, the RTE Contempo Quartet which has forged a unique place in Irish musical life will take to the stage at the Clifden Arts Festival along with leading pianist, Dr. Fionnula Moynihan. The Quartet is currently Ireland’s National Television & Radio Broadcaster’s Quartet in Residence and is also the resident Quartet on the West Coast of Ireland in the Galway Music Residency. This June, they were offered a joint honorary degree of Doctors in Music by the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Since its formation in Bucharest in 1995, the Quartet has performed more than 1,800 concerts world-wide in 46 countries, including prestigious venues such as Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome and Carnegie Hall. Con Tempo have had the honour to meet and play in front of world personalities such as Prince Charles, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, EU Ministers, Michael D. Higgins, Hollywood stars and Nobel Prize winners. Collaborations with other distinguished quartets have also been a feature, such as the Amadeus, Arditti, Vanbrugh and Endellion, to name just a few.
Dr. Fionnuala Moynihan completed her doctorate in Music Performance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music where she studied with Dr. John O’Conor and Professor Reamonn Keary. She is the first person to be awarded a Doctorate in Music Performance from the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Dublin City University. She graduated from Birmingham Conservatoire with the Graduate award for pianists and the prestigious Weingarten scholarship enabling her to commence her studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.
Fionnuala is widely acknowledged as one of Ireland’s leading pianists. She has a particular affinity with the works of both baroque and classical composers. Fionnuala has been awarded many prizes both at home and abroad including a Bank of Ireland Millenium Scholarship, the prestigious Maura Teissier Bursary and the Rena Menasche Award from the Tel-Hai Piano Masterclass series held in Israel. She was awarded the John Field Prize at the 2009 AXA Dublin International Piano Competition. She has recently been invited to perform ‘The Complete Piano Sonatas of Mozart’ in a five-recital series in the Triskel Arts Centre Cork. Fionnuala currently teaches piano performance at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
The Esposito Quartet comprises four musicians with a combined bounty of experience as orchestra leaders, principals, professors, recital and recording artists, whose common love of the quartet treasury drove them in 2010 to ignore it no longer and seek each other out. With Mia Cooper, Anna Cashel on violin, Joachim Roewer on the viola and William Butt on the cello, they formed the ensemble and named it after pianist and composer Michele Esposito, who for forty years from 1888 was the initiator for much of the chamber music making in Dublin. On their second national tour, they will perform Esposito’s String Quartet No.1 as well as Mozart’s most famous quartet, the “Dissonance” and Mendelssohn’s passionate String Quartet Op.13. They will perform at the festival on Tuesday the 19th of September.
The Irish Guitar Quartet will perform in the Church of Ireland, Clifden on Friday 22nd of September. The Irish Guitar Quartet is drawn from some of Ireland’s most talented and versatile classical guitarists and is sure to be recognized as one of Ireland’s premier instrumental ensembles. Renowned members Jerry Creedon, David Keating, Colin McLean and Aengus Kirakowski have garnered acclaim as soloists on concert stages around the world, with each member contributing their individual strengths toward creating an exciting, dynamic and engaging ensemble. The Programme including Latin, Folk and American Classics transports listeners around the world in a single concert experience.
These acclaimed Quartets are awe inspiring and infinitely moving, beautifully balanced ensembles that searches for beauty of tone. Allow their smooth, flowing music to wash over you as you plummet into the very depths of classical and contemporary music.
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About Clifden Arts Festival
The longest running community arts festival in Ireland, Clifden Community Arts Week, now in its 40th year will take place from September 13th – 24th and yet again promises to have something to excite everyone in this year’s programme. Audiences can expect a very high quality artistic programme with a superb literary, musical and visual art content which again will have the community arts of Clifden and the surrounding hinterland as a central focus with creative writing, music, theatre, graphic design and film workshops and performances taking place in the local schools for the duration of the festival.
