Violinist Mairéad Hickey and cellist Sinéad O’Halloran will launch a new Cork-based chamber music festival, Ortús, on 8 November at the National Concert Hall.

The festival will take place in Cork City and East Cork on 26–28 February 2016 and feature young Irish classical musicians in particular.

Hickey comments,

Sinéad and I had always talked about setting up a chamber music festival and we realised that right now there are so many really talented young Irish musicians that are studying all over the world.

O’Halloran adds,

Ortús Chamber Music Festival will provide a performance platform for young Irish musicians studying abroad to be able to come home to Ireland and share all that we’ve learnt with each other and with the community.

Hickey and  O’Halloran will be joined in the first Ortús Festival by Siobhán Doyle (violin), Ed Creedon (viola), Martin Moriarty (viola) and Chris Ellis (cello). The festival will include a world premiere of a new work titled Pause by Sam Perkin that is commissioned by Ortús and marks the centenary of the 1916 Rising.

Nineteen-year-old Hickey is a former winner of the National Concert Hall Young Musician of the Year award and has also been awarded the Fr Frank Maher Scholarship, the Belfast Clandeboye Festival Flax Trust Bursary and the Bank of Ireland Catherine Judge Memorial Award. Internationally, she has won the Jeunesses Musicales Violin Competition in Romania in 2012 and the Antonio Salieri Prize in Italy in 2010. She is currently studying with Mihaela Martin at Kronberg Academy in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany.

Twenty-one-year-old O’Halloran was offered an Artistic Merit Scholarship to pursue a postgraduate Performer’s Diploma at SMU Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, Texas. She is currently a student of Gregor Horsch at the Robert Schumann Hochschule für Musik, Düsseldorf, and is a member of the European Union Youth Orchestra. She has been Principal Cellist of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, the CIT Cork School of Music Symphony Orchestra and Meadows Symphony Orchestra (Dallas).

Barry Douglas will speak at the November launch at the NCH.

For more on Ortús Chamber Music Festival, view the video below, or visit www.ortusfestival.ie