Jeremy Hill, writing in the New Ross Echo, opined that "this piano festival now ranks in quality and imaginative organisation and programming with any other event of its like around the world. Its uniquely personal atmosphere is engendered by the superb location and acoustic quality of St. Mary’s Church. A dedicated volunteer and amateur committee deserves the sweetest smelling bouquet of bright and colourful flowers for they present an unequalled opportunity for music lovers to engage with the genius of world class piano playing."
REVIEWS FOR THE 2011 NEW ROSS PIANO FESTIVAL
Reviewed by Jeremy Hill, New Ross Echo
The history of music in New Ross is due another glowing page after the recent Piano Festival weekend at St. Mary’s Church where audiences were treated to work by eighteen composers from 18thC Amadeus Mozart to 21stC Stephen Gardner. As a prelude to the main event, the 2011 New Ross Piano Festival began with a young players’ concert – 20 budding pianists from the south-east aged from 11 to 18. The concert platform is a lonely place even for the professional soloist but these young musicians relished the chance to play a concert grand before an audience.
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BBC Music Magazine, July 2011
Everything stops for the piano in New Ross, - even the traffic……
This quiet town in County Wexford is certainly an out-of-the-way venue for a major piano festival. The nearest airport, Waterford, is so small that you can easily absently-mindedly wander through passport control without knowing you have done so until you see the provincial station-style sandwich bar on the other side. Then you have to either get a taxi, or – better option – hire a car to reach New Ross itself.
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Review from Kimon Daltas, INTERNATIONAL PIANO REVIEW, January/February 2012
New Ross is a small port town in County Wexford. It’s easy to get to, whether by ferry to Rosslare or flight to Waterford; yet you’d be hard-pressed to think of New Ross as a destination in itself. Except, that is, in a long weekend towards the end of September, when the New Ross Piano Festival brings a volley of top-notch concerts to the serendipitously generous acoustic of St Mary’s Church.
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REVIEWS FOR THE 2010 NEW ROSS PIANO FESTIVAL
Reviewed by Chloe Cutts, International Piano
The brochure for the 2010 New Ross Piano Festival o ffers the reader a quote from a Medieval poem in which the poet, describing the building of the walls of New Ross, makes the observation: ‘and every stranger finds a welcome and is received with great joy’. Eight hundred years later, the line could be describing present day New Ross, and even more so the New Ross Piano Festival, a boutique festival
founded by a group of music enthusiasts living in the port town of New Ross in southeast Ireland, who had met at various musical events in neighbouring towns and decided to launch something similar in
their own.
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Review by Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone, December 2010
It is an improbable location for a piano festival but, my word, it’s a good one. Snuggled in the south-east corner of Ireland, an easy 30-minute drive from Waterford Airport [landing, baggage collection, passport control and hire car all done in 10 minutes], New Ross lies by the side of the River Barrow. It’s all “a bit shook”, as the locals say. Click here to read more
Reviewed by Chloe Cutts, Classical Music
Here is a wonderful example of how a little inspiration and a large amount of collective enthusiasm can go a very long way.
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REVIEWS FOR THE 2009 NEW ROSS PIANO FESTIVAL
Reviewed by Pat O’Kelly, Irish Independent
Now in its fourth season, the four-day New Ross Piano Festival, with Finghin Collins as Artistic Director, displays innovative planning both in content and artistic flexibility.
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Reviewed by Jeremy Hill, Wexford Echo
When they buried General John Moore, one time captor of Wexford in 1798, at Corunna in 1809 there was only silence... ‘not a drum was heard, not a funeral note’... and in St. Mary’s Church, New Ross last Friday not a cough was heard, not a snuffled-up sneeze, as Finghin Collins opened this year’s piano festival with Bach’s Partita No.2.
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Reviewed by Dick O’Riordan, Sunday Business Post
St. Mary’s Church sits on a steep hill looking over the grey rooftops and winding streets of New Ross and beyond to the wide Barrow river. It was from here that John F Kennedy’s forebears departed for the New World.
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