Date: Friday 29th April 2022
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Main Stage, National Concert Hall
Tickets €24 (Concessions €12)

National Symphony Orchestra
Ensemble Interforma - Ensemble Next
Stefan Asbury, Conductor (NSO)
Marco Blaauw, trumpet

Ensemble Interforma - Musicians from Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris
Bastien David L'impatiente (Irish Premiere)
David Fennessy Panopticon (Irish Premiere)

SHORT INTERVAL

National Symphony Orchestra
Louis Andriessen Anachronie I (Irish Premiere)
Benjamin Dwyer In Memoriam Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (IrishPremiere)
Rebecca Saunders Alba (Irish Premiere)

In keeping with the Festival’s theme of all of us currently feeling and expressing multiple emotional states all at the same time post-lockdown, this is a programme of celebration, memorial and everything in-between.

The celebrations start with performances of Irish and French works by the Royal Irish Academy of Music’s Ensemble Interforma, directed by Sarah Sew, who will be joined on the platform by the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris’ Ensemble Next for the Irish première of David Fennessy’s Panopticon. A performance of David Bastien’s L'impatiente with musicians from both institutions further marks a new strategic partnership between the two organisations in the framework of the Ireland-France Joint Plan of Action signed in August 2021 during the visit of President Macron to Ireland.

After a short break, the stage is then taken by the National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Stefan Asbury. In the orchestra’s programme, we commemorate the passing of Louis Andriessen in 2021, a man who was a great friend to many, played a key role in the early days of Crash Ensemble, and was one of the most influential Dutch composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We’re playing an early - and, at the time, highly contentious - work of his, to call to mind and celebrate his unquenchably iconoclastic, energetic and mischievous spirit. This is followed by a long-overdue premiere of a new work by Irish composer - and iconoclast in his own right - Benjamin Dwyer. The finale of the programme is courtesy of the Irish premiere of Rebecca Saunders’ contemporary masterwork Alba, a trumpet concerto written to be performed by another great friend to many: Marco Blaauw, who will be very well remembered by Dublin audiences for his appearance with the German contemporary music ensemble MusikFabrik performing the music of Frank Zappa in the “Defrosted” 2018 NMD Festival.