A Galway Early Music Festival Event

The Irish Consort

Roisin O’Grady / Róisín Elsafty (singers), Sarah Groser (treble viol), Malachy Robinson (bass viol), Ed Tapceanu (bass viol), Ronan Browne (whistles), Siobhán Armstrong (Irish and Italian Renaissance harp)

This programme explores Ireland’s cultural position, in the early modern period, as an English colony, ruled by English monarchs, with periodic struggles for self-determination resulting in failure each century, until the early twentieth. It includes some of the earliest extant Irish music: monastic plainchant; ancient Irish harp compositions; 16th-century Irish songs and dances, together with music familiar to the Elizabethan colonists: lute songs by John Dowland, lively consort music by William Byrd, and European Renaissance dances composed by Cormac McDermott, a royal Irish harper at the English court. The music of the later colonial period includes Irish airs that travelled to Britain together with 17th – and 18th -century elegies for Irish heroes.

Directed by harpist, Siobhán Armstrong, The Irish Consort is a unique ensemble that fuses the passion and talent of some of Europe’s finest early music performers with that of prize-winning, traditional Irish musicians and singers, exploring the intersection of Irish and European early music.

CD LAUNCH
Immediately after the concert, at our Zoom Festival Club, we will launch the CD Music, Ireland, and the Sixteenth Century (The Irish Consort).