MUSIC AND madness is the theme of this year’s Galway Early Music Festival 2010 which takes place from Friday May 28 to Sunday 30 and features music from the Mediaeval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods.
Cantoral, the Female Chant Schola of the Irish World Academy, and Vox Prophetica, featuring students of the University of Limerick, start the festival on an ecstatic note with Mediaeval chant in the chapel of the Poor Clares, Nuns’ Island.
In The Devil Made The Game, the Quadrivium quartet will mix European and Japanese card games with 17th century and contemporary music.
The vault of St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church will echo with wild song and dance which chart Mediaeval and Renaissance attitudes to madness, hysteria, and the healing powers of music, in Ensemble eX’s wonderfully visual Possessed, featuring dancer and baroque guitarist Steve Player.
Love is a madness nothing can cure and this will be reflected in a show by the Ensemble Retrospect of Clara Sanabras (voice and baroque guitar ) and Harvey Brough (voice and psaltery ), based around the old Mexican ghost story of La Llorona.
There will be numerous free events on the Saturday of the festival including dancing, card playing, chess games, and a town crier.
There will also be theatre performances from Moonfish Theatre Co and Simon O’Dwyer’s Pre-Historic Irish Horns.
Moonfish and Pre-Historic Horns are coming together for a magical re-telling of the medieval Irish legend of Mad Sweeney (Buile Shuibhne ). Sweeney has been driven mad in battle and taken to the treetops in an amazing flight around Ireland. Mad, sad, funny, and scary in turn, the show features in shadow puppetry and the music played on the prehistoric instruments.
Healing Horns, an installation in the Galway City Museum during the festival, is based on the Irish legend of the wounded warrior, who is placed in a vat of freshly killed beef and then laid within a circle of horn players whose music completes the cure.
There will also be a new film and music talk by Eric Fraad on the nature of madness as understood from the Mediaeval through the Baroque era. The talk features a film showing parts of Mr Fraad’s production of Handel’s Messiah performed at the Utrecht Early Music Festival.
For a full programme and to book tickets see www.galwayearlymusic.com or email [email protected]. The festival programme is available as a physical copy around the city.
