Finghin Collins has announced the 2017/18 season of concerts for Music for Galway where he is Artistic Director.

Celebrating the links between music and dance, the season opens on 29 September with this is an Irish dance. The work by Riverdance star Jean Butler and Belfast-based cellist Neil Martin explores the often invisible interplay between dancer and musician in live performance.

Sam Perkin
The work of Cork composer Sam Perkin will feature across the season, his 1916-inspired work Pause performed on 8 November, and the world premiere of a new suite of dances – commissioned by Music for Galway – performed by Nathalia Milstein on 4 February. 

Perkin’s work Nesting Doll was also performed by Collins and dancer Stephanie Dufresne at the season launch on 5 September.

Gwendolyn Masin, Daria van den Bercken and RTÉ NSO
Violinist Gwendolyn Masin will perform on 9 March at The PorterShed.  Her new album was recently described by Adrian Smith in The Journal of Music, as ‘technically flawless but, crucially, it also steers clear of that chic blandness which so often characterises these virtuoso portraits and makes them indistinguishable from each other… There is certainly plenty of grain to her style…’.

Dutch/Russian pianist Daria van den Bercken, The Gould Piano Trio, Musici Ireland (who have just performed a series of five successful concerts at the National Concert Hall), Juan Pérez Floristán, and Collegium, with director Mark Duley and cellist Adrian Mantu, will also perform.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra perform on 12 April, and uilleann piper David Power and Camerata Kilkenny are at NUI Galway on 25 May. 

Collins and Rusbridger in Conversation
On 28 April, in Music for Galway’s very first collaboration with Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian and author of the book Play it Again, will discuss music, writing, politics and Chopin with Finghin Collins (who has just released a Chopin recording on the Claves label). The event will be moderated by Editor of The Journal of Music, Toner Quinn.

Free concerts and Midwinter Festival
On the last Wednesday of each month starting on 27 September, a free lunchtime concert, sponsored by SAP,  will take place at The Cube in NUI Galway, followed by a repeat of the concert at 6pm in The PorterShed. Artists include Mike Nielsen, Aisling Kenny, and Alex Petcu.

Music for Galway’s Midwinter Festival (19-21 January at the Town Hall Theatre) focuses on the theme of composers in love, and features Dearbhla Collins, Simon Aspell, Christopher Marwood and more. 

For further details on the Music of Galway season, download the brochure below or visit www.musicforgalway.ie

Finghin Collins is also Artistic Director of the New Ross Piano Festival, which runs this month from 20 to 24 September and features classical and – for the first time – jazz pianists too. Artists include Kristian Bezuidenhout, Zoltán Fejérvári, David Ggreilsammer, Seán Morgan-Rooney, Enrico Pieranunzi, Elizaveta Ukrainskaia, Phil Ware, Klára Würtz and more. For further details see here.