41st Cork Folk Festival to Host Live and Online Events

John Spillane at Cork Opera House for the launch of the 2020 Cork Folk Festival (Photo: Darragh Kane)

41st Cork Folk Festival to Host Live and Online Events

John Spillane, Pauline Scanlon, Strung, The Bonny Men, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Nia Byrne, Anna Mieke, Karen Casey, Greenshine and Maija Sofia to perform at five-day festival.

The 41st Cork Folk Festival, which takes place from Wednesday 30 September to Sunday 4 October, will host over 20 events this year, both live and streamed online.

The programme includes two anchor events at the Cork Opera House that will be streamed live on TG4 social media platforms. The concerts will be produced by Aniar TV and have no audience. The first of the concerts, on Friday 2 October at 7pm, will feature singers John Spillane and Pauline Scanlon, The Lee Valley String Band, and singer Karen Casey with Beoga members Niamh Dunne and Seán Óg Graham. On Saturday 3 October, the live-streamed concert will feature the Bonny Men, Strung (Maria Ryan, Lucia Mac Partlin, Maria O’Connor and Aonghus McCarthy), and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh with Nia Byrne & Manus Lunny.

Kino and Triskel
The opening event of the festival will be the Cork Singers Club at the Kino venue on Wednesday 30 September. On Thursday at the same venue, singer-songwriter Leah Sohotra will perform with multi-instrumentalist Martin Leahy, followed by Anna Mieke on Friday, and Maija Sofia, The Four Star Trio, and a celebration of Sliabh Luachra music on Saturday. On Sunday there will be a fiddle concert with Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Nia Byrne, Garry Cronin and Seamus Sands, an accordion and concertina concert with Cliona Halley, Richard Lucy, Paul Clesham and Hughie Kennedy, a concert by singer Aoife Scott, and a fundraiser for Fermoy musician Ron Kavana.

At Triskel Arts Centre on Friday, folk trio Greenshine will perform with Martin Leahy at 6.30pm and 8.30pm.

There will also be Zoom music workshops with Matt Cranitch (fiddle), Máire Ní Chéilleachair (song), and Karl Nesbitt (flute) on Saturday. Email cfolkf [at] gmail.com to book your place.

Launching over the weekend is John Murphy’s album The Burning of Cork – The City in Flames and the book Becoming an Irish Traditional Musician by Jessica Cawley. A Cork city song tour, which will be streamed live on Cork Folk Festival’s Facebook page, is planned for 4 October.

Following the festival, a six-part series titled Cork Folk Festival @ 40 and presented by Doireann Ní Ghlacáin will be broadcast on TG4. Running on Sunday nights at 9.30pm until 8 November, the six episodes will showcase specially recorded concerts from last year’s festival. Artists include Iarla Ó Lionáird, Steve Cooney, Arty McGlynn and Eliza Carthy. 

For more information on the festival and booking, see www.corkfolkfestival.com. For Triskel bookings visit www.triskelartscentre.ie or phone 021 4272022, and for Kino events see www.uticket.ie.

Published on 22 September 2020

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