Festival reviews

2025 reviews

Entertaining Piano Festival

New Ross Piano Festival now in its 19th year has refreshed its programme and still kept the quality classical programme and added to it with an impressive John O’Conor concert ‘The Lighter Touch’- a popular programme of well-known classics. It expanded its Young Pianist Programme and improved its schools talks as well as a masterclass with John O’Conor. It impressed with a coffee concert with an up and coming Irish pianist, David Vesey who has a new CD out, ‘Carolan Reflections’ and a world class piano duo performing a four hand ‘Broadway and Hollywood’ classic tunes.

Plans for 2026 are already taking shape.

DAVID VESEY is a young pianist and arranger who impressed with a coffee concert. He was confident and played pieces from his new Carolan CD.Turlough O’Carolan was the blind harper (after smallpox)whose work connected the view we have of the 17 century of traditional music and the patronage of a landed gentry whose musical tastes were more continental. There were the Irish language connections of a harpist playing for ’empty pockets’ and the patronage of wealthy gentry.

I love the slow air ‘Maire Dall’ (Blind Mary) and the familiarity of ‘Si Bheag Si Mhor’, ‘Planxty Irwin’ and the glorious finale ‘Carolan’s Concerto’. FINGHIN COLLINS wowed with an appreciative audience for an evening concert. His selections were based around mostly French composers who had associations with a French piano maker Pleyel. Collins was invited to play a Swiss festival, delivering a programme on a Steinway D series and then on a Pleyel reconstructed piano. I would have loved to hear the contrasts and how different piano makers can influence the sound. He was relaxed and in a playful mood with a series of dance influenced pieces from Ignaz Pleyel, Chopin, and revival of interest in work by Joseph O’Kelly and Georges Pfeiffer with mazurkas and lively, lyrical romantic playing. His finale, the Debussy ‘L’Isle Joyeuse’ was a musical wow with lots of happy romantic passages and a climax that powered up to an almost ogasmic release.

After the interval, the now famous German Greek pianist, Danae Dorken with the remaining members of the Castalian Quartet impressed with the passion of a Brahms Piano Quintet. It had a barnstorming finale and a great whoosh of dramatic playing to earn another standing ovation. DUO PIANISTICO was a new addition with an afternoon concert where entertainment was the keyword. The duo of Stephanie Trick (St Louis) and Paolo Alderighi (Milan) revisited and rearranged the Great American Songbook ‘Broadway To Hollywood in Stride and Swing’. These improvised and cleverly arranged tunes for four hands were energised by the vivacity of the two pianists and it was foot tapping enjoyment from Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, John Kander and Frederick Loewe. This was a highlight of the Festival.

LIAM MURPHY
MUNSTER EXPRESS

Provincial is Perfect in Norman New Ross

If anything was to emphasise the intimacy of the New Ross Piano Festival, it was the warmth that spread through the audience as John O’Conor, Ard Sagart of Ireland’s pianists, carefully made his way up the aisle of the church towards the loving embrace of the piano with which he would make one. Those attending felt that an honour was being bestowed on them by this distinguished musician’s presence especially when he expressed his deep sorrow at the loss of a lifelong friend for whom he then played an unprogrammed threnody. O’Conor’s enchanting recital, in the compact environment of St. Mary’s Church (founded 1210 by the Norman leader William Marshall) of four Schubert impromptus, a Beethoven sonata and a glorification of the nocturne made it an unforgettable beginning to this annual, cultural Festival.

The imaginative flair of Festival Musical director, Finghin Collins, brought to a free mid-day recital, David Vesey’s clever synthesis of traditional and classical music which he shaped into his own arrangements of the music of the 17 th century blind harper, Turlough O’Carolan, and the progressive influence of the music of 19th century Franz Liszt. Neither O’Conor’s nor Vesey’s recital would have had half their effect in a grand concert hall. Up ‘down the country’!

Finghin slipped into his role as performer on Friday evening with the ease and grace of the professional he is. His walk to the piano had a controlled ease to it, his self-confidence containing eagerness and excitement. Artfully contrasting the well-known with the little-known, he ranged from Chopin to O’Kelly (Irish composer, 1828-1885) via Rhona Clarke, Elaine Agnew, Pleyel, Pfeiffer and Debussy. The latter’s L’Isle Joyeuse closed with exciting force during which Finghin thrillingly reached new found depths to his playing so excelling in the performance of his art – a true virtuoso.

Magdalene Ho, winner of the prestigious Clara Haskil competition in 2023, gave an awe inspiring recital which culminated in a glorious playing of Bach’s Partita #6. Written for the ‘spiritual delight’ of the player, it is essentially an engagement with prayer and an audience is not an expectation. In Saturday’s recital, the audience became a congregation. Deep prayer can lead to ecstasy, a high form of elation. Ho’s devotion brought her ‘congregation’ close to that elevated state while the metronomic tempo led relentlessly on, with an extreme range of expression and touch along with the utmost control. She was riveting.

Bach featured again in Shunta Morimoto’s recital in which he overcame the challenges of the scorer’s dynamic variation and rhythmic ambiguity His slight figure disguises a masterly ability to reveal the compositional twists and turns of the piece and his reading of Chopin showed him to be beyond his years in maturity, interpretation and performance.

Danae Dörken’s Shuman was exciting and vigorous; her demeanour and enjoyment at the keyboard added a special ingredient. Spontaneity can’t be crafted but encountering it lifts live performance; if it’s in the mix, it adds to the experience. Daniel Lebhardt included a sprinkle in his confident and thoughtful performance of three lesser known though significant, works of Liszt.

The welcome inclusion of chamber music in the programme was the cream over the strawberries. The Castalian Quartet played with assurance creating wonderful sound from its instruments. They quickly conquered any doubts about the relatively unknown Piano Quintet by Ernest Bloch which alongside its melodies includes the sort of variations of tempo and dynamics in the Bach we heard earlier. This Festival does an excellent job in bringing ‘new’ compositions to an audience eager to broaden its experience of music so we were offered, all told, O’Kelly, Pfeiffer, Adès, Say, Azmeh, Hatzidakis, and Bloch.

The emotional response to the music of this festival helped to transcend the mendacity and bilious nature of much of today’s world; it illumined the philosophy of Truth, Beauty and Excellence.

Jeremy Hill

From revelatory Bach played with astounding maturity by a 22 year old to four-hand jazz

Ten of the 11 artists at the weekend: Duo Pianistico (Paolo Alderighi and Stephanie Trick), Magdalene Ho, violinists Abigél Králik and Mairéad Hickey, Danae Dörken, viola-player Natalie Loughran, cellist Steffan Morris, Finghin Collins and Daniel Lebhardt All performer images by New Ross Piano Festival.

High on the hill of fascinating New Ross in County Wexford sits its greatest treasure, the ruined 13th century Gothic beauty of St Mary’s. Unless you come at it from the east, its glories are concealed behind the working church which completes it and takes the place of the old nave, built in 1813 and “improved” twice later that century.

Plain and spacious inside, with a few military memorials on the wall, the acoustics of its shoebox shape (think a smaller Musikvereinsaal without the trimmings) are perfect, as pianists great and less well-known have attested over the 19 years of the stunningly original New Ross Piano Festival. Collins – a world-class pianist, as I rediscovered during a day at Kilruddery House as part of the Dublin Chamber Music Festival back in June – shapes exactly the kind of continuity in programming that make it worth travelling to an out-of-the way place like New Ross: chiefly, this year, three evening concerts in which three pianists gave a first half recital complemented by one of the others joining the last fling of the quartet called Castalian – more of that anon – in a big piano quintet. He mentioned several big names who had come with their own repertoire but didn’t want to collaborate outside it; that’s not really what a festival is about, though locals feel privileged to catch the greats.

Others clearly had entered into the spirit, to judge from a beautifully-produced CD linked to the town’s other treasure, the series of 15 large embroidered panels telling the story of New Ross’s Norman origins and stitched by Irish volunteers over the past two decades.

The pianists playing the 15 complementary pieces by Ireland’s finest composers include Lisa de la Salle, Nicholas Angelich, Joseph Moog, Cédric Tiberghien and Collins himself (I heard him play two of them at Kilruddery, most astonishingly maverick Gerald Barry’s interchange of tense silence and repeated patterns for the Wexford folk waiting for the Nomans to land).

This year the range favoured the young, and I’m sorry I (just) missed a masterclass in which Collins’ former teacher, the legendary John O’Conor, now 78, guided 12-year-old Louise Byrne (the other recipient of his wisdom was multitalented Peter Ryan, first Irish leader of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, whom we’ll be seeing in that capacity in the UK soon).

Collins has also been mentoring Malaysian pianist Magdalene Ho, the winner of the 2023 Clara Haskil Competition, for which he is Chairman of the Jury. Ho gave the second of the 12 noon concerts; again I’m sorry to have missed the first, in which another young pianist, Laois-born David Vesey, included his arrangements of Turlough O’Carolan alongside Liszt’s Consolations. Ho worked hard on her programme with Collins, and it was one of perfect contrasts. Limpidity, rubato and clarity of counterpoint informed her perfect late-morning opening gambit, Brahms’s all-too-rarely-heard Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 27 No. 1; Ades’ Three Mazurkas shift from wrong-note pastiche to something deeper and more spare. They, too, were done with perfect gauging of the moods.

What poleaxed us, though, was the revelatory grasp of Bach’s Sixth Partita in E minor, fiendishly difficult in more ways than one. I heard lines and ideas in this magisterial work I’ve never noticed before, starting with a superbly articulated fugue; what’s more, Ho kept the flow going across the range of approaches to the dance. I can’t imagine any pianist of any age bettering this.

The other 12 o’clock recitalist, Shunta Morimoto, who won the Hastings International Piano Competition and is even younger than Ho (still 20), kept his Bach lighter, as befits the eight-movement French Overture in B minor. The Chopin half of his programme showed real individuality, the tendency to slow into very inward reveries sometimes a bit too much for my taste, but as it was his, it should be honoured. As we found from personal interaction, Morimoto is shy but has a real spirit of fun; no-one was expecting him to add the Grande Valse in A flat major to the G flat major Impromptu, sparkling perfection.

There was one other younger-generation pianist I hadn’t encountered before, German-Greek Danae Dörken. I first heard her with the one-off reconstituted Castalian Quartet in Brahms’s colossal Piano Quintet, and her range from stormy tirades and colossal romps to ideal simplicity in the lovely Andante, un poco Adagio and inward chromatic modernity in the introduction to the Finale matched theirs. Collins only learned in July that what until recently constituted the Castalian had dissolved.

So we were bereft of the brilliance of the phenomenal Sini Simonen or her fellow violinist Daniel Roberts; viola-player Natalie Loughran and cellist Steffan Morris, who had joined the quartet at a relatively late stage, were here for three performances only, and the miracle of it was that replacement violinists Abigél Králik and Mairéad Hickey made it feel as if this team had been playing together for years. The hushed passages which were such a feature of all three performances added to the amazement. Dörken’s recital the next evening was the one (half) disappointment of my time in New Ross. Her Schumann Op, 12 Fantasiestücke weren’t as I knew them: the lyrical passages a touch precious, the outbursts rushed, with too much use of the sustaining pedal. Above all “Ende von Lied” (“End of the Song”) didn’t make sense to me. But Dörken is a true pioneer, and two of the four pieces she included from her album Odysee enriched the festival’s range. Charismatic composer-pianist Fazil Say’s Kara Toprak (Black Earth) broke new ground with the imitation of the Turkish saz or lute (in this case a big one) as played by the legendary composer of the ballad which inspired Say, Âşık Veysel (1891-1973) and represented hautingly by muted piano strings.

Striking, too, was Syrian Kinan Azmeh’s Waiting for Friday, reaching a frenzy in its memory of the pro-democracy, anti-Assad protests of 2011. We knew we’d dropped a notch when Dörken segued into Manos Hatzidikis’ relatively inconsequential Waltz of Lost Dreams. Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance from El amor brujo, like the Schumann, didn’t feel idiomatic. But at least we’d had two visions.Collins began his own recital in the first of the three solo/piano quintet evenings with two evocations by Irish women commissioned by RTE lyric fm for the 2006 Dublin International Piano Competition, of which he is Artistic Director. Rhona Clarke’s Tread Softly felt improvisational, nothing more, but Elaine Agnew’s Seagull was variously evocative of the seascape by poet Chris Agee which inspired it. To bring the audience back to easy lucidity, Collins began the Pleyel-inspired part of his programme with the piano master’s sunny E flat major Rondo and short B flat major Sonata, both shot through with memorable melodic ideas.

There was Chopin, of course – the B major Nocturne Op. 9 No. 3 and the very short A minor Waltz which Collins came across at the Morgan Library in New York – since the composer found Ignaz and specifically son Camille Pleyel’s pianos “the last word in perfection”. I was lucky to hear Roman Rabinovich play on one of Chopin’s Pleyels at the Cobbe Collection in Hatchlands, Surrey; Collins’ Pleyel project, now on his latest CD, came about when he played on a Pleyel 280 concert grand alongside a Steinway D at a Swiss festival.

One rather than two salon pieces apiece from miniaturists Joseph O’Kelly and Georges Pfeiffer might have been enough; but the last pairing crowned the programme: the seemingly unHaydnesque Hommage à Haydn by Debussy, proud owner of a Pleyel, and here paying homage to Pleyel’s teacher, too, and an almost orgiastic climax to Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse. I witnessed Collins unexpectedly possessed at Kilruddery by Schumann’s “In der Nacht” , and that was the discombobulating case here too. If anything was going to cap that in the solo piano repertoire, it had to be two of the five symmetrically arranged Liszt pieces in Hungarian Daniel Lebhardt’s selection at the last, Sunday afternoon, concerto (the start of a standing ovation at the end). Let’s face it, I was dreading having to face the rodomontade of the B minor Piano Sonata yet again; but Lebhardt is a master of control in even the most excessive Liszt climaxes, and like Ho in the Bach Partita, he made sense of it: passion and precision in perfect balance.

Just when you thought no further well-tempered virtuosity could follow, we had a hair-raising performance of the Legend No. 2, “Saint Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves” – a turbulent but ultimately affirmative companion-piece to “Saint Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds”, so celestially delicate at first, somehow complementing the peace of old St Mary’s and its bird-filled cemetery (St Francis would have been doing his thing around the same time as William Marshal and his wife Isabel, Countess of Pembroke, were having St Mary’s constructed, as detailed on the Ros Tapestry below). I avoid all-Liszt programmes as a rule, but I’d make an exception for Lebhardt; nobody who was there on Sunday afternoon will hear better interpretations of this problematic music. Likewise Lebhardt’s perfect accord with the Castalians in a work with which I was shamefully unfamiliar, Ernest Bloch’s Piano Quintet No. 1. Composed over two agonising years in the early 1920s, it could even be a wild lament for the Holocaust (Bloch lived on until 1959). The anguished harmonies are persistent, one obsessive motive keens over and over; unisons in the strings made me wonder if this had started as a sonata for solo instrument and piano (it had). The slow movement, Andante mistico, seems to drift endlessly but gives way to an impassioned climax which subsides back into the hypnotic flow.

For anyone not expecting it (I wasn’t), the epilogue is astonishing: a slow and hard-won peace. Few C major final chords can feel so powerful (a Martinů resolution or two, perhaps). Coming out of this utterly concentrated world felt strange indeed, and it was as well that the final piano quintet of the festival, Dvořák’s rightly celebrated and adored A major, Op. 81, left us on a high rather than not knowing what to do with ourselves. Collins’ dialogues with first violinist Králik were especially affecting; again, there was more delicacy in this interpretation than I’ve ever heard in it before.

What might have been merely a jolly intermezzo on Saturday afternoon proved every inch as much a top-quality tonic as the Dvořák. I’d begun to make the acquaintance of American Stephanie Trick and Italian Paolo Alderighi in the drive from Enniscorthy, and warmed to them instantly. But what would the Duo Pianistico have to say, musically, in free-wheeling jazz variations on 11 numbers (more including medleys) from the Great American Songbook? The variety was infinitely more than I was expecting.

Further endearing themselves to the audience with informative, natural introductions to each piece, they had them in the palms of their hands from Harry Warren’s “Jeepers Creepers” onwards. Hands would interlace, one pianist would jump aside for the other to go off on a stride solo (Trick’s speciality). Embracing all styles in Kern’s “Sunny” and a medley from Meet Me in St Louis (Trick’s home city, incidentally), they captivated with a chromatic counterpoint-riff for “Stormy Weather” and rounded off the poignant Elsie verse from Cabaret’s signature number with poetic reflections. Among the many extraordinary performers I met in New Ross, these were as addictive for future investigations as any. As for the 20th anniversary New Ross Festival in 2026, expect further arrows in Finghin’s rainbow.

David Nice
theartsdesk

Nuance and Range at New Ross Piano Festival – The nineteenth edition of the New Ross Piano Festival in Wexford took place on 24–28 September, featuring Danae Dörken, Daniel Lebhardt, Magdalene Ho, John O’Conor, Shunta Morimoto, Finghin Collins, David Vesey, Duo Pianistico and the Castalian Quartet.

Of all the various classical music festivals dotted around the country, the New Ross Piano Festival is unique for its focus on the piano. Now in its nineteenth year, the event has grown into one of Ireland’s premier classical festivals with a host of top international names regularly appearing on its programmes at St Mary’s Church of Ireland. This year featured a selection of emerging talents including German-Greek pianist Danae Dörken, rising Hungarian star Daniel Lebhardt and two young competition winners Magdalene Ho from Malaysia and Shunta Morimoto from Japan. These were joined by well-known Irish pianist John O’Conor, the versatile up-and-coming talent David Vesey and, of course, Artistic Director Finghin Collins. A focus on the piano quintet format with the Castalian Quartet on board for three of the evening concerts formed the backbone of the festival with quintets by Brahms, Bloch and Dvořák. This review covers the Saturday and Sunday concerts of the five-day festival.

The first of the weekend’s ‘coffee’ concerts featured Magdalene Ho, the winner of the 2023 Clara Haskil Piano Competition in Switzerland. Ho’s somewhat nonchalant performance mannerisms – with a mop of hair partially covering her face and her head frequently turned over the left shoulder – belied a deeply expressive and searching style of pianism. Opening with Brahms’ Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 21, No. 1, her superb phrasing and sense of judgement allowed her to extract the maximum emotional expression from the work.

Another, more colouristic side to her playing was demonstrated in her performance of Thomas Adès’ Three Mazurkas, which are more preoccupied with the creation of atmospheric textures than their title would suggest. But as good as this was, it was her performance of Bach’s Partita No. 6 that really left the greatest impression. This was played with remarkable imagination that brought out all sorts of interesting details in the contrapuntal textures. Particularly impressive was her astonishing control of dynamics in both short- and long-range phrasing which made Bach’s lines sing with refreshing vibrancy. Ho finished with an encore of Busoni’s Bach transcription of ‘Ich Ruf’ zu dir’ and, all in all, this was quite simply a breathtaking performance from a gifted pianist.

Broadway and Hollywood
The mid-afternoon concert by Duo Pianistico (Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi) featured four-hand arrangements of classic tunes from the musical theatre of Broadway and Hollywood. Their arrangements not only included flawless stride technique but also more impressionistic devices in their reimagining of tunes by the likes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans. While the physical logistics of alternating accompaniment and melody parts with complex hand crossing added an entertaining visual dimension, the pair also found space to express their individual personalities in various solo sections with Trick revelling in her powerful stride technique and Alderighi in his more contemplative jazz interludes. The pair concluded their performance with a version of Johnny Cash’s ‘Forty Shades of Green’, a tune that was evidently well known to the majority of the audience.

Music from the Eastern Mediterranean
The first half of Saturday’s evening concert featured German-Greek pianist Danae Dörken who had made her Irish debut the previous evening playing Brahms’ first Piano Quintet in F minor. For this concert she opened with Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, and although her shaping of the melodic phrases in the more lyrical movements of the Schumann was very fine, some of the louder and busier passages were occasionally tackled with too much bluster.

More interesting were the selection of pieces by composers of the Eastern Mediterranean that featured on her 2022 album Odyssee. The outer sections of Turkish composer Fazil Say’s Kara Toprak (which translates as ‘Black Earth’) required the pianist to pluck the strings inside the piano in imitation of the saz, an instrument common in the Middle East and Central Asia. This certainly gave the piece an exotic flavour, but also remarkable was the kaleidoscope of musical styles in the middle of the piece that transitioned from the elegiac to funky jazz to romanticism with a smoothness that made their co-existence seem quite natural

Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh’s Waiting for Friday also began with a sparse atmospheric texture, but the highlight was an edgy rhythmic motive in the left hand that provided the accompaniment with bursts of swirling Eastern-sounding figurations and percussive chordal interplay between the hands. The gentle melodies of Greek composer Manos Hatzidakis’ Waltz of Lost Dreams formed a pleasant interlude before Dörken concluded her portion of the recital with a lively performance of de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance.

Bloch quintet
The second half of the concert featured Ernest Bloch’s rarely performed first Piano Quintet with Hungarian pianist Daniel Lebhardt being joined by the Castalian quartet consisting of violinists Abigél Králik and Mairéad Hickey, violist Natalie Loughran and cellist Stefan Morris. The group gave a performance that perfectly conveyed the oscillation between the work’s pronounced angular motives and its sections of withdrawn lyricism. The intensity of their playing never wavered and the balance between the quartet and Lebhardt on piano was excellent. The quartet navigated the work’s challenging microtonal sections and some beautiful sonorities emerged such as the glassy stillness at the end of the second and final movements.

Contrast and artistry
The final concert of the festival I managed to attend was Sunday’s coffee concert featuring a programme of Bach’s French Overture and Chopin by Shunta Morimoto who was awarded first prize in the Hastings Piano Competition in 2022. As evinced straight from the opening overture movement, Morimoto’s approach to Bach went big on contrast, exploring the full dynamic range of the piano in successive iterations of the stately theme. However, it was when he was playing softly that his artistry was particularly dazzling. Despite speeding through the busiest of contrapuntal textures, somehow the lines came out crystal clear. In slower movements such as the central sarabande, the music was played with such delicacy that one somehow felt the movement could melt into silence at any moment.

Morimoto’s interpretation of the Chopin half of the recital was similarly original. The opening marches of the Fantaisie in F minor began with the delicate voicings to which we had, by now, become accustomed and the build-up to the arrival of the stormy C minor was beautifully constructed. Even better was the triumphant E-flat march theme that emerged from the chordal haze which preceded it with a gritty sense of drama. My only quibble here was Morimoto’s hushed lingering in the chorale that felt a tad indulgent and somewhat knocked the momentum that had been building up to this point.

However, this kind of spontaneity does seem to be Morimoto’s hallmark and he followed a curiously introspective interpretation of Chopin’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat major with a contrastingly extrovert performance of the composer’s Valse in A-flat major that was not listed on the programme. Although the official programme concluded with Chopin’s charming Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Morimoto wasn’t quite done and he was applauded back to the stage to perform the briefest encore I’ve ever heard – Chopin’s Prelude in C major – that somehow seemed like the perfect ending to this memorable performance.

Twentieth anniversary
While Magdalene Ho and Shunta Morimoto may have been the two pianists that most impressed me, the consistently high-quality of all the artists performing over the four concerts is a testament to Artistic Director Finghin Collins who has been a driving force behind the event since its inception with Music for New Ross. Huge credit must also go to the organising committee led by the ever-present Connie Tantrum who shared duties with Collins in introducing the artists before each concert.

Next year the festival will celebrate its twentieth anniversary and the organisers have promised a gala concert of big names that will certainly be something to look forward to. While this star-studded concert may prove to be one of the hottest tickets in next year’s classical music festival calendar, if the New Ross Piano Festival continues with its long-term strategy of seeking out the best in emerging international and domestic talent, it should secure its longevity well into the future.

ADRIAN SMITH
The Journal of Music

2024 reviews

In September people travelled from Cork and Dublin and other regions of Ireland – even a couple from Belfast – to listen to some of the best international pianists performing stunning concerts in St Mary’s Church.

One by one they played for the rapt audiences. Michael McHale left them smiling with his pleasing programme of lighter familiar music, including many Irish melodies that he arranged himself. Eoin Fleming, playing to a younger audience of second level students, literally danced around the stage while explaining his varied choices. On Friday, two of the giants of the piano were, amazingly, in New Ross. Both Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne attract full houses in London and internationally, and both played, to great acclaim, at the Proms this year. It was an immense thrill to have them at the Festival.

Nobody who was there will forget Yukine Kuroki’s concert on Saturday morning. This slight young Japanese woman played with astonishing technique, the most delicate and the most rapid, with breathtaking forte passages which left the audience breathless, some even in tears.

The Artistic Director of the Festival, Finghin Collins, delighted everyone with his sensitive playing of a romantic programme of Schumann and Mendelssohn, and later that evening the Spanish Piano Trio Rodin played an emotional Russian programme including Prokofiev’s heart-breaking ballet music for Romeo and Juliet, arranged by the Trio.

On Sunday, the first woman to win the prestigious Leeds Piano Competition, Sofya Gulyak, gave a bravura performance of some of the most difficult works in the piano repertoire – an astonishing hour of music-making. In the afternoon Steven Osborne introduced a fascinating group of pieces, ranging from the piano-batttering “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” to Bill Evan’s “I loves you, Porgy” from Porgy and Bess. The Festival closed with the Trio playing their arrangement of West Side Story.

Of course, there were other events elsewhere. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, five young pianists sponsored be the Dublin International Piano Competition gave pop-up sessions on pianos in the Library and the Dunbrody Café. Would-be stars of the future. Also possibly stars of the future were the 21 young local pianists who performed in their special concert on Wednesday, playing on the super Steinway grand in front of a delighted audience. Primary school children were introduced to the piano in the Library, and two fortunate advanced students took part in a public master-class with Steven Osborne.

It was a brilliant few days of top-class music making, and the voluntary committee deserve great credit for bringing such a feast to New Ross.

JESSICA O’CONNOR
INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS REGIONAL

NEW ROSS TRIUMPHANT
A Feast Of A Festival

The 18th New Ross Piano Festival found itself in transition, and Artistic Director Finghin Collins rose to the occasion by programming not only an exciting and diverse programme that balanced tried and trusted with emerging talent and new composer choices but at the same time, expanding the number of concerts and giving a fresh emphasis to youth, workshops and masterclasses.

Friday Night: Two Schubert Concerts were the highlight. At 19:00, the acclaimed Paul Lewis performed two of Schubert's last Sonatas. The composer died at age thirty-one, plagued with a sex-related disease, and both sonatas contained examples of depression, despair, and anger—pounding anger like Beethoven's anger at his deafness and lack of recognition. Schubert was a child prodigy who wrote many songs and song cycles.

His Sonata D959 was spirited with a brief prelude before anger and stormy attacking music. Some say he displayed not just illness but insanity, but commentators at that period had different contexts that ‘cancelled’ the battle between musical genius and morality.

Lewis was brilliant, and the exciting passages were thrilling with the attack, agitation and uneasy reflection.

At 21:00, Lewis was joined by another acclaimed pianist, Steven Osborne, for the four-handed virtuosic playing of Schubert’s ‘Lebenssturme’ and the ‘Grand Duo Sonata’. This was a show of intensity, concentration, and technical expertise. Veins stood out in necks and jaws, and the rapport was exceptional. Historically, such four-handed performances were seen as ‘novelty’ or ‘battling pianos’, but this was an impressive crowd-pleasing rapport, and the standing ovation was loud and sustained.

Saturday Night: At the 19:00 concert with a large attendance, Finghin Collins impressed with a diverse programme. The Haydn Sonata Hob. 34 in E minor was like a taster/palate cleanser with shut-eyed tranquillity and dextrous technical flair. A selection of Robert and Clara Schumann pieces impressed with romantic sweetest and variations. Robert’s dance inspired ‘Papillon Op2′, which was episodic but exciting. Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words’ was beautiful and romantic, and the inclusion of
Villers Stanford’s ‘Caprices Op136’ was excellent and marked the centenary of his death in 1924.

The 21:00 concert featured the sensational trio and ‘find of the festival’ Trio Rodin—a Spanish ensemble formed in Utrecht. They are Jorge Mengotti (piano), Teresa Lli (cello), and Carles Puig (violin). Their Prokofiev ‘Suite from Romeo and Juliet' was outstanding, with dramatic and emotional playing, especially in the ‘Montagues and Capulets’ section, and the ‘The Death of Juliet’ sequence was tender and tragic.

The Shostakovich Piano Trio No2 Op67 featured Jewish musical styles. It was achingly beautiful and tender as memory, with murmuring pizzicato passages full of tension and agitation. The ‘Largo’ was like a version of despair and atonement, and the closing movement was a ‘Dance of Death’ and a ‘March into Hell’.

A triumph of a festival.

LIAM MURPHY
MUNSTER EXPRESS

More delectation at the New Ross Piano Festival 2024

A live performance, whether in concert hall or theatre, offers a unique experience to audience and performer alike. No two performances are ever exactly alike and audiences carry varying moods and expectations. Favourite recordings offer continual satisfaction but the ultimate performance is as elusive as craic before it was clichéd; it happens spontaneously, unexpectedly and inexplicably and when it does it’s PFM. In a year in which I was only able to attend two concerts in the 2024 New Ross Piano Festival, hope was high. There is invariably an outstanding recital but you need to be at everything to ensure you were there for the real deal. Attending with visitors from Australia, one the wife of a leading Aussie pianist, even the reputation of the established festival itself was at stake.

With Paul Lewis’s arrival at the piano, relief was already in the air granted by his aura of assurance, confidence and likeability. Though Schubert was a troubled man, his art and craft as a composer came from the good side and Lewis’s interpretation brought his audience into the realms of sublimity while we enjoyed his pianissimos quieter than the church mice. Worth the journey, commented the travellers.

A New Ross Piano Festival without Finghin Collins would be strawberries without cream. His breadth of interest was on display in a programme from Haydn to Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Mendelssohn and Stanford in which he played masterfully through 200 years of musical development leaving his audience with the impossible task of agreeing the trophied piece. His inclusion of Stanford calls for us to revisit an overshadowed Irish composer; the visitors left impressed and thankful for an evening of jouissance.

JEREMY HILL

2023 reviews

The Divil at the 2023 New Ross Piano Festival 

The music of Franz Liszt often features at the New Ross Piano Festival (NRPF) where last weekend an audience of newcomers and oldtimers satiated their expectations; unlike their antecedents in Clonmel in the winter of 1840 who forgot they had engaged the virtuoso, New Rossians came eagerly to hear Ellen Jannsen’s thrilling and forceful account of Liszt’s  Ballade #2 in B minor. Another infrequent, but not entirely unexpected guest – the very Divil himself – imposed himself in the score in order to challenge the performer but Ellen gave him the flick and creamed her performance delectably while in a state of heightened consciousness stimulated by her audience, itself similarly in the zone. This rare coincidence is what live music is all about. Yevgeny Subdin’s playing of Scriabin’s Piano Sonata #5 was similarly electric, though his demeanour gives little away. And if that wasn’t enough, along comes Meagen Milatz from the vast wheatbelts of Saskatchewan with an informative verbal introduction to her selection of Clara Schumann’s music. Clara’s compositions don’t get the space given to her husband, Robert, but aficionados know better and certainly would if they’d heard her recital on Saturday with its rich, warm and vital tones enlivened with strength and vigour. Clara was self-mentored in the nowadays scarce culture of the musical salon but what is the NRPF if not a contemporary version of the bygone soirée? Many people in the audience were known to one another, even if only by sight, and with whom the musicians mingled freely throughout the festival creating a convivial collective of enthusiasm. The consequent warm relationship engendered engagement between musician and audience which helped to heighten performance and reception. 

Composer Frank Martin’s 1925 Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello on popular Irish melodies is a take on Irish traditional music akin to the work of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Delius, among others, drawn from folk tunes. Martin’s piece included a complex mix of superimposed rhythms where a slip jig in 9/8 plays simultaneously with a regular jig, The Blackthorn Stick, in 6/8. Meagan Milatz, on piano, accompanied Mirijam Contzen, violin, and Alexander Chaushian, cello; the latter two were seen occasionally foot tapping during parts of the challenging mix of rhythmic character, perhaps a subconscious act of authenticity invariably seen in traditional music sessions. The trio’s rousing rendition suggests the piece deserves more exposure. Lucifer then interfered with the original programming when a scheduled player fell ill to be replaced with the ever energetic Milatz and her partner, Cameron Crozman. They also looked at folk music with Crozman’s cello cleverly imitating the sound of a flute with his bow playing the 2 bass strings far down the fretboard towards the bridge.

The hellion was still at it but he was finally finished off by Yumeka Nakagawa in her thrillingly brilliant performance of Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op. 28. Small in stature but mighty in forte, she moved beautifully through largo, allegro and lento until exploding with dramatic force in prelude #16, Presto con fuoco. Chopin’s score is rife with devilish technical difficulty and unexpected twists and turns all treated with astonishing ability and felicity. Brava.

Festival artistic director, Finghin Collins, brought his majestic presence and passionate delivery to Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1 and two Chopin nocturnes, his choices contrasting Berg’s uneasy tonal harmonies (decried as degenerate art by the Nazis) with the sublimity and grace of Chopin’s strains.

The festival’s annual celebration of piano playing of ‘mesmerising virtuosity, unanimity of vision, intelligent interpretation, and intensity of sound’* continues unabated in the intimacy of St. Mary’s Church with its fine, natural audile properties. Attendees who chose to forego Saturday’s evening recital in favour of a rugby match, though Ireland won, missed an inimitable musical experience.

 *Jeremy Yudkin, BostonGlobe.com, 11 Sep. 2023 (not specifically about this festival but relevant).

JEREMY HILL

The 17th New Ross Piano Festival had to cope with rugby matches, storms, leaf-shedding winds, bucketing rain, and an event cancellation due to ill health. It has built resilience over the years and, thanks to Artistic Director Finghin Collins, has developed an exciting programme. Adding jazz to the festival has yielded excellent results in expanding the audience. None more so than the concert by Kit Downws (based in Germany). He is a contemporary jazz musician and composer who surprised and impressed me.

He didn’t have a programme, but in his creative way, he spoke to the audience about music in the moment, and what moments! His work has developed a crossover genre repertoire with contemporary music, organ music and country-influenced pieces on CD.

Arriving onstage in a cream cheese-cloth shirt, dark trousers and stockinged feet, he began by ‘noodling’ with improvisations and then started a series of sounds within the Steinway grand piano. My heart sank. Not another deconstructor of the music and the instrument. But his technique built and built into passionate exposition of ripples and cascades and sweet, sweet jazz.

After the interval, he was at the organ in the balcony loft and created wonders on those pipes, adding drones into full church organ mode. Then he wowed with a variation of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’.

Returning to the altar stage, he rocked into honky tonk and lonesome train whistles fading into the distance and drifting into late-night cabaret jazz and ‘Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair’.

His segue into Skip James Delta Blues was so impressive, and then the Scottish fiddle influences of Aidan O’Rourke from the original Blazin’ Fiddles band……..

Liam Murphy

2022 reviews

Enchantment in New Ross

An elegant flight of granite steps lead the way into St. Mary’s Church in New Ross which has one of those fortunate interiors that enriches the sound of music. The professional musicians who play in the church’s intimate space respond with overt pleasure to the acoustical characteristics of this ancient, medieval place; it’s this innate response that adds vital advantage to the height of exceptional performance. 

Such was the accomplishment of two recitals at this year’s New Ross Piano Festival that audiences found themselves spellbound in states of enchantment. The Albion Quartet, with Georgian pianist Tamara Licheli, gave the first of these fruitions in the playing of American composer Amy Beach’s early 20^th century Piano Quintet Op. 67. Live performance is sometimes fortuitous enough to bring everything together in a climax of perfection. Licheli’s accompaniment was delicately judged to find the precise fulcrum between quartet and piano and this integration elevated the totality of the performance. The violins, viola and cello included a Stradivari and a Guarneri, the former known for sweetness of sound and the latter for gutsy timbre but each and all producing the divine music of the spheres. Finding itself by good fortune in an auditory sweetspot, the performance soon stunned the audience into utter silence andan embrace between player and listener enfolded while the proverbial falling pin was suspended in mid drop. 

Saturday’s midday Coffee Concert by Ukranian soloist Dmytro Choni occasioned further reverie. His assured personality and dignified address at the keyboard created an immediate rapport with piano and audience and it took only a few bars for us to realise that something special was forthcoming. Choni is a gifted pianist and despite the extraordinarily good performances of the other five in this remarkable festival his recital stood out as exceptional. Music and performance is above politics but the interface between the calm and simplicit bagatelles of Choni’s fellow countryman Valentin Sylvestros and Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata #2 seemed an apt metaphor for the David and Goliath confrontation that is so disturbing the world. 

Other memorable performances included Finghin Collins’ Schubert:  Der Wanderer, John Plowright’s Chopin: Tempo di Marcia, Tamara Licheli’s Schumann:  C major Fantasia, F-X Poizat’s Ravel: preludes, and Máire Carroll’s Philip Glass: Étude #12.

All the adjectives in the dictionary could never conjure up the magical musical expression of Dmytro Chroni’s sublime performance at one of the finest piano festivals on offer. 

JEREMY HILL
26 September 2022

2021 reviews

A live-concert resurrection to lift us out of musical limbo

New Ross Piano Festival was back in action with some transcendent performances

Musically, we’re in a kind of limbo. The country’s biggest musical institution, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, still hasn’t found a way to play regularly for live audiences, though it is performing for a paying public at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this Friday – a giant leap, in current circumstances. And, who knows, the definitive move of the orchestra from RTÉ to the National Concert Hall, currently scheduled for Monday November 1st, may change all that, though currently classical music is pretty sparse in the hall’s own schedule. At the moment it looks as if it’s regional promoters who are being quickest to get back to normal activity. The Westport Festival of Chamber Music took place earlier this month, Music for Galway has announced its 40th season with concerts running up to January, the tiny Derravaragh Music Association, which gives concerts in Tullynally Castle, Co Westmeath, is back in action, and last weekend brought full programmes from the Sligo Festival of Baroque Music and the New Ross Piano Festival.

New Ross opened with a confident free midday recital by Tiffany Qiu, who is currently continuing her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her programme of Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Debussy, Elliot Teo (a fellow student in London) and Liszt followed the simplest and most straightforward of lines: a succession of pieces that she particularly likes. On this occasion it was the clean lines of three movements from Bach’s fifth French Suite which most fully suggested her potential.

The main opening concert started with an extravaganza, the arrangement of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture for four players on two pianos made by Robert Keller, chief editor at Brahms’s publisher, Simrock. It was a peculiar choice, given the composer’s reservations about Keller’s transcriptions, and it sounded exactly like what it was – a version for domestic consumption, prepared at a time when music lovers had no access to radio or recordings. Keller himself likened his arrangements to “drawings”. Brahms’s musical thought came awkwardly in and out of focus in the performance by Katya Apekisheva, Christian Chamorel, Finghin Collins and Charles Owen.

Overly sculpted

Apekisheva and Owen are an established duo, and performed together in works by Poulenc and Milhaud, and also in solos, Owen offering overly sculpted performances of Chopin (the Nocturne in F sharp, Op 15 No 2, and the Barcarolle) and Apekisheva a hell-for-leather, aggressive account of Prokofiev’s sharp-edged Sarcasms.

The festival’s major new commission was Sally Beamish’s Sonnets for three pianists and two pianos. Six hands is a rare enough combination, but Beamish took the idea quite a bit further in a theatrical piece sparked by Shakespeare’s Sonnets 19 and 129.

Sonnets is a playful piece that casts the players as the Bard himself (Owen), the dark lady (Apekisheva) and the young man who was of interest to both (Collins). It’s also a theatrical piece for which the first entry set the tone – Collins sauntering up the aisle of St Mary’s Church, more interested in flicking through pages on his mobile phone than anything in the wider world.

Beamish makes atmospheric use of some songs of Dowland and plays quite directly with the interpersonal tensions she’s depicting. The theatrical realisation, however, did get a bit too guffaw pantomimic, as in the moment when the three players were jostling for position on a single piano stool.

Israeli pianist Einav Yarden made a point of juxtaposing Haydn and CPE Bach, the one a giant in so many areas of music, the other a famous son whose quirkiness continues to make him elusive to many listeners. Yarden’s approach to both composers was very brittle, melodic lines shard-like, the stretched logic of CPE Bach pushed beyond breaking point. It was almost as if she had taken the performing aesthetic of postwar serial music and applied it to the late 18th century. She shone, however, in Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös’s Erdenklavier-Himmelklavier, a 21st-century tribute to fellow composer Luciano Berio, and even more so in Eötvös’s Dances of the Brush-Footed Butterfly. In Christian Chamorel’s solo recital it was also the most recent work, Heinz Holliger’s Elis, a set of three “night-pieces” from the early 1960s, that brought the best playing.

Pedal piano

The highlights of the festival came from Cédric Pescia and Philippe Cassard. They played Debussy’s two-piano arrangement of Schumann’s Op 56 Studies for the pedal piano, a long-obsolete instrument that emulated the organ by giving the piano a pedal board. These studies are now most often heard in organ recitals, where some of the pieces take on a kind of fairground music feel. It was good to hear them in more sensitive and shapely accounts that more accurately reflect their true nature.

And it was Pescia and Cassard who brought the festival to a blazing close, in Liszt’s two-piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. Brahms was particularly severe in his view on Keller’s two-handed arrangements, saying, “I would have considered a two-hand arrangement interesting only if an extraordinary virtuoso did it. Somewhat like how Liszt did the Beethoven symphonies.” And Liszt’s four-handed arrangements work even harder than his two-handed ones to deliver the musical essence of those works.

Pescia and Cassard have already recorded the two-piano Beethoven Choral Symphony, in Berlin last year, on a pair of Bechstein concert grands. The clarity of the recording studio was not delivered on Steinways in New Ross, but the spirit of the music was just as well served in a reading where the shape and grandeur of the music – and, of course, some glorious and not so glorious moments of pianistic clamour – brought the audience leaping to their feet.

Michael Dervan

New Ross Piano Festival 2021 Sounds the End of Lock-down

Reminiscent of an alien monolith, two black Steinway Grands were geometrically entwined side by side on the stage in St. Mary’s Church. As the light dimmed, four pianists, all of international standing, took their places, two to a piano. The cultural drought of lockdown was broken by a shower of delightful music from 40 fingers and thumbs rendering, most appropriately, the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms.  

Resourceful as ever, the festival’s commissioning of three contemporary works offered composers the opportunity not only to participate in an established festival but to have their work performed by one of Ireland’s finest pianists – Finghin Collins. Ireland has a significant number of well regarded contemporary composers in its midst and past programmes have included the 15 commissions of the Ross Tapestry Suite setting a high bar for an informed audience. This year Donnchadh Hughes and Harry O’Connor competently seized their chance but the third commission was, disappointingly, much ado about not very much.

However, the towering strength and breadth of the Festival’s renewal in terms of musicality was as exciting, eclectic, educative and entertaining as ever despite the irritation of a mobile phone which halted a charged performance in mid stream of Beethoven’s 9^th symphony in a two piano arrangement by Liszt. The contrasting character of each of the performers, Phillippe Cassard and Cédric Pescia, merged seamlessly in a thrilling performance of a work that roamed through changes of tempo, key and mood to finish in an energetic finale and a justified resounding applause. In a more peaceful recital, a deft Einav Yarden’s sophistication was just what nature was asking for in Dances of the Brush-footed Butterfly – an evocative contemporary work which left a certain bumblebee for dead. Katya Apekisheva’s playing of Prokofiev’s Sarcasms was notable for her extremes of dynamic and a reminder that pianissimo is not a missing element of the Russian’s compositions. Putting these two works into the weekend’s programme assures Finghin Collins’ place as artistic director supreme. His own piano playing was a significant part of what many thought the ‘best in show.’ Ernest Chausson’s compositions are few; he died in an 1899 bicycle accident at only 44. On Friday night, his emotionally rich Piano Quartet was a melodic eye-opener given exemplary expression by piano, violin, viola and cello. It was a deeply satisfying revelation in composition and performance.

Late night listeners at Saturday’s 10pm concert were treated to a rare account of a Tchaikovsky Piano Trio – his memorial for a close friend. Technically challenging for the pianist, the strings (violin and cello) delivered haunting melody and mournful moments in roles requiring strong playing.

The overall French air of the programme included works by Poulenc, Milhaud, Saint-Saëns and Fauré supported by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Haydn, Schumann, Schubert, Mozart and others. With ten and more highly rated musicians performing in the intimacy of St. Mary’s Church, the New Ross Piano Festival presents a world-class weekend for the price of a single ticket to the world’s great concert halls, none of which are ever likely to match the overall quality and quantity of this remarkably bundled three day annual event. Viva!

JEREMY HILL

2019 reviews

New Ross Piano Festival finishes on a high note

A piano festival such as the New Ross Piano Festival has a fascination that no comparable festival for, say, flute, violin or clarinet, would ever have.

Like most other instrumentalists, flautists, violinists and clarinettists bring their own instruments with them. Only a select few pianists do the same, and none of those have yet been heard in New Ross.

So, with many of the concerts in New Ross featuring three pianists in succession, the audience knows that each of them is dealing with exactly the same mechanism and the same acoustic. There’s no finessing of the instrument between performances. Though, obviously, whoever comes last in any particular programme has the short end of the straw, as the tuning of the piano will have soured from the workout by concert pianists.

Tchaikovsky was so concerned about forgetting to write the Seasons that he had his servant remind him, month by month, for a year

I’ll never forget that in the days when the Dublin International Piano Competition offered players a choice of instrument – Steinway or Kawai – a lot of listeners seem to have spent their time listening to the instrument rather than the player. Sure, the pianos were different, probably even more different as an experience for the players than for the listeners. But I doubt if many listeners would have had a high success rate in identifying the instruments in a blind listening test. There were extremes – of brightness and brashness, of softness and delicacy – that could be wrought from either piano.

Those kinds of extremes were well in evidence from this year’s line-up of pianists in New Ross. The evening concert on Friday was typical. Israeli pianist Matan Porat opened with the first and fourth of Johannes Brahms’s Ballades, Op 10, which he played with a forthright deliberateness which rather weighed the music down.

Finghin Collins provided a fluid background for the strings to work against in Clara Schumann’s trio.
Ireland’s Finghin Collins was joined by two French musicians, violinist Régis Pasquier and cellist Henri Demarquette, in the substantial Piano Trio that Clara Schumann composed in 1846 and which became the most performed of her works during her lifetime – she lived until 1896.  After rehearsing the trio for the first time she wrote: “There is no greater joy than composing something oneself and then listening to it. There are some nice passages in the Trio and I believe it is also fairly successful as far as form is concerned, but naturally it is still women’s work, which always lacks force and occasionally invention.”  A month later, after hearing her husband Robert’s Piano Quartet, she felt that her trio seemed “more harmless each time I play it”. And a year later, after her trio was published, and Robert had written his Trio in D minor, she described her own work as “quite effeminate and sentimental”.

The playing in New Ross was light and deft, with Collins providing a fluid background for the strings to work against. Pasquier, a veteran of French string playing, is now in his 70s and, however firm his intentions, his intonation proved variable in this work.

Barry Douglas completed the programme with Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons. In terms of piano sound he delivered a sense of scale that neither Porat nor Collins had managed. What you might call his normal speaking voice, in musical terms, was quieter than either of the others, yet he could swell to grander climaxes and also curl up quietly to whisper in your ear.

The Seasons remains Tchaikovsky’s most popular set of piano pieces, even though the composer himself is reported to have thought them “of little significance”. They were commissioned for a music journal, and the composer was so concerned about forgetting to write them that he had his servant remind him, month by month, for a year.

Douglas found character in every one of them, and his playing communicated a kind of infectious fondness that made the playing time of 40 minutes or so fly by.

The two midday recitals were highly contrasted affairs. Sae Yoon Chon, a pupil of John O’Conor in Toronto who took the top prize at last year’s Dublin International Piano Competition, is as totally secure and clear-speaking as you would expect a prizewinner of any of today’s international piano competitions to be.

His touches of individuality do sometimes come across as a kind of finger-pointing emphasis that’s not always persuasive in what it draws attention to. And, with the core of his programme given over to song transcriptions, it was a pity that he still sees projection as a valid alternative to cantabile. His most sensitive playing, surprisingly, came in a nicely suggestive selection of Debussy’s Préludes.

Italian pianist Maurizio Baglini is a musical shapeshifter, the kind of player whose extremes bring to mind the implausible elasticity of people and objects in the world of cartoons.

His goal seems to be to weave spells, to treat the piano as a kind of huge, black-and-white magic wand. On the one hand he can use that wand to spin out tone of such gossamer delicacy that it’s hard to imagine there was any kind of percussive impact involved in its creation. On the other, he can summon up a blazing brassiness to pin you to your seat.

Not everything he does holds together persuasively, and he left little in what he played – three Scarlatti sonatas, three of Liszt’s Paganini Studies and Robert Schumann’s Carnaval – in the exact shape the composer’s notation seems to suggest. But there was no shortage of fantasy or of technical wizardry in his playing.

Porat’s best music-making came in his late-night recital titled Lux. The lighting of the venue was brought into play so that the programme began and ended in darkness, and the music was chosen to suggest the various stages along the way. The blaze of midday sun, for instance, was delivered through Alexander Scriabin’s Sonata No 4, and the darkness after sunset provided by the opening movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

For the grand finale of three concertos with Camerata Ireland, the festival moved from St Mary’s Church to St Michael’s Theatre. Collins took the conducting honours and Douglas the playing honours. And, with both coming in a beautifully sprung and finely-detailed performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 2, the festival ended on a high.

Michael Dervan, Irish Times

Piano Festival hits the right notes in New Ross

MUSIC lovers travelled from near and far to hear some world-class music at this year’s New Ross Piano Festival. The audience at the Thursday evening concert in St Mary’s Church came out in awe at the talent and technique of the jazz pianist, Gwilym Simcock. Many had heard of him, but not seen him, and it was a concert where seeing the live performance was astounding. Festival director Connie Tantrum said, ‘He has, of course, won recognition in the jazz world for many years, and is at present professor of jazz piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. We were very privileged to have him play in New Ross. As one member of the audience said, “If this was in Dublin, he would have had a thousand people in the audience”. Several people had indeed travelled from Dublin to hear him. As well as playing so brilliantly, he gave short and often humorous introductions to the pieces he chose to play. It was an incredible tour de force from beginning to end.’ Earlier in the day, the Phil Ware Trio also pleased audiences. Ware and his bass player Dave Redmond and drummer Kevin Brady showed how skilfully they are musically as individuals while working together to play a superb programme. On the previous day, Fergus Sheil had started the jazz side of the festival by playing a very different kind of jazz piano in New Ross Library and in the Dunbrody Famine Ship Experience visitor centre. His programme was based on the Great American Songbook and included many arrangements that he had created himself. Another highlight of the start of the festival was the Young Pianists Concert. ‘This has grown from strength to strength. This year was particularly poignant as it was dedicated to a young student, Karl Kirby, who sadly passed away this year, and who had taken part in several of the concerts over the years. The standard of playing was very good this year, and it proved to be a rewarding night for all concerned,’ Ms Tantrum said. The focus on young people continued on Friday, when Sinead Crowley showed primary school students from Listerlin, Cushinstown and New Ross the workings of the piano in the library, and let them experience making music on it. More or less at the same time, second-level music students were gathering in St Mary’s Church, where 19-yearold Clara Siegle from Germany talked to them about Clara Schumann, whose 200th anniversary was last week.

New Ross Standard

Tender was the night at intimate St Mary’s Church

THE dominant sense of this year’s New Ross Piano Festival was tenderness. It was, after all, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Clara Schumann whose relationship with her husband Robert and their endeared friend Johannes Brahms became something of a folie à trois. Clara’s romanticism suffused her life as composer, performer and carer of two men as well as her children. The ultimate expression of the festival’s emotion was offered by Sae Yoon Chon whose lunchtime recital was of the finest quality, elevated by the intimacy of St Mary’s Church. With its small capacity, this recital had the feeling of a drawing room soirée, private and unique. Rapt in its own silence, the audience heard the pianist producing the tiniest of sounds through extreme delicacy of touch. Chon was stealthy as a stalking cat, his fingertips almost motionless as he sounded the upper reaches of the keyboard and created a sound impossible in the great concert halls of the world. Maurizio Baglini, a marathon runner, equally enjoyed the challenge of producing small sounds in his Sunday lunchtime recital when he said the attentiveness of the audience made him think he was in a recording studio rather than a live performance. Penderecki’s sextet for string trio, clarinet, horn and piano is a contemporary composition not 20 years old and unashamedly political with strident, insistent sweeps of protest on the strings of an ancient Strad and even older 17th century viola. New Ross always has contemporary work in its programme and the audience approval showed its own maturity. The inter-European nationality of the sextet, French, Irish, and English, underlined the cultural importance of the EU and the possible ill effect of Brexit on music making in the post-Brexit UK. At the time Penderecki was composing his modern music, Jeff Koons was developing his sculptured balloon animals, which were soon to be seen at Versailles, while Damien Hirst was to feature at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What price one of their works now – $58 million for a Koons, what price a ticket to St Mary’s – €20? Following the Penderecki, Finghin Collins gave a very moving and robust account of one of the last compositions by the too-young-todie Franz Schubert. Is there a tougher Finghin Collins emerging to complement the immensely capable and sensitive conservative? For the night owls among us, the Saturday late night concert comprised 10 pieces covering 10 centuries of composition from early Gregorian chant to Thomas Adès’ recent ‘Darkness Visible’. This interesting recital programme brought us from early morning darkness to the light of day and a return to the dark of night. They were not nocturnes but Matan Porat’s playing had the same soporific effect as he drew another glorious day of music day to a close. Keat’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an attempt to reconcile the real with the unreal: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: – do I wake or sleep?” Tender was the night in New Ross.

Jeremy Hill

Social media comments from Liam Murphy, Munster Express

Musically it has been an unusual and mostly amazing week, as I listened to such a diverse selection of tunes. CSNY, Derek Flynn a Waterford Singer/Songwriter’s Ballad of a Broken Girl, The Human League, Shygirl’s single UCKERS, The Who and the Kords versions of Boris The Spider and jazz pianist and composer Gwilym Simcock’s NEAR AND NOW.
Then to go to New Ross Piano Festival where Simcock gave a memorable and melodic concert of world class quality.
Lunchtime concert with Clara Siegle @ New Ross Piano Fest. A Clara and Robert Schumann influenced concert that showed her confident, youthful dexterity and technical ability. I managed to make her informative talk to assembled school pupils and I was as impressed as the pupils by her 6 hours practice daily to develop the professional career that is ahead of this beautiful and assured performer.
Saturday night and the wind howled and the rain lashed into surface floods and inside St Mary’s Church all was snug and welcoming for a wonderful concert.
A virtuoso sextet played a Penderecki 2000 composition that was ultra-modern with clockwork precision and the sound of confusion and alienation. Such was the despair and desolation that I wondered what would be the defining music of Brexit or Extinction Rebellion.
I was in awe and then after an interval Finghin Collins transported the audience into the hyper manic and depths of depression of a Schubert Piano Sonata.
It was electric as the trees tossed angry shadows on the stainglassed windows.
What a night of music.
Maurizio Baglini got a standing ovation for his entertaining playing of showy technical Scarlatti, Liszt Etudes de Paganini and the impressive Carnaval by Robert Schumann
He spoke to his audience and the love of music shone in the warm September sunshine.
He has several projects running in Europe using Web Piano to popularise and foster a love of music. After lunch, the festival moved to St Michael’s Theatre where the acoustic was excellent for three pianists and Camerata Ireland. This was crowd-pleasing if a little bland after the highlights of the festival, but this was an extension of the festival’s remit.

Liam Murphy

2017 reviews

“New Ross’s greatest claim to fame is undoubtedly persuading John F. Kennedy’s great-grandfather to take a boat to America in 1849, during the Irish potato famine. Statues, a homestead-museum and an arboretum now testify to New Ross’s gift to the New World. A couple of hours’ drive south of Dublin, this town appears an unlikely location for a piano festival. But back in 2006, the young Irish pianist Finghin Collins got together with local music-lovers to found an annual piano weekend. For a venue they settled on the venerable St Mary’s Church of Ireland, a snug spot with comfortable seats and good acoustics. A decade on, the New Ross Piano Festival has expanded in extent and ambition, now stretching over five days, with the innovation of a preliminary jazz day and performance opportunities for emerging pianists of the region.  But its greatest asset is still its intimacy, built around just three days of solo and small-chamber “classical” performances.

Collins has meanwhile stormed the heights of international fame, with recent tours of America, Australia and China, augmenting an ever-busy European schedule.  His calendar in 2015 included Hungary’s chamber-music festival in Kaposvár, directed by violinist Kristóf Baráti and cellist István Várdai.  Hence, his concept for New Ross 2017:  a festival involving “Hungarian musicians playing non-Hungarian music, and non-Hungarian musicians playing Hungarian music — so there is a whole mix going on”.  And so it was, with Liszt, Dohnányi, Bartók, Kodály, Ligeti and Kurtág works running as a national leitmotif through its programmes.

Those programmes especially featured the Hungarian pianists Klára Würtz, winner of the 1988 Dublin International Piano Competition, and Zoltán Fejérvári, winner of the Montréal International Music Competition just last May, among the Festival’s half-dozen pianists.  Each evening, in turn, Würtz, Collins and Fejérvári joined with the superb Baráti-Stumm-Várdai trio in playing Fauré, Schumann and Brahms piano quartets.  It sometimes felt, indeed, like a mini-eisteddfod.  Musicologist, Endre Tóth, in short talks each lunchtime, enthusiastically kept the Hungarian themes before the audience’s mind.

The rising piano star of this Festival was thirty-year-old Zoltán Fejérvári.  Unassuming when approaching the podium and still needing some practice in the noble art of applause-catching, Fejérvári, when actually seated at the keyboard, leaves no doubts about his technical prowess and deep musicianship.  The splendid sparseness of Beethoven’s late Six Bagatelles, fueled by the Master’s craggy and outlandish counterpoint, was impeccably rendered.  And the Liszt Sonata in B minor, after some initial rhythmic contortions, emerged as an intellectual “tour de force”, eschewing the customary bombast for an imaginative and consistent reading of Liszt’s demanding specifications.  A lesser pianist often cheats a little to gain speed or lets slip some of the melodic threads in Liszt’s complex musical fabrics, but Fejérvári’s delivery was true to the score, technically uncompromising, yet never forsook Liszt’s powerful poetry.  When joining Hungarian colleagues in Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C minor, Fejérvári’s talents as a chamber player were even more to the fore.  The balance, stylistic integration and reconciliation of individual interpretations made this the chamber performance of the Festival, notwithstanding Collins’ masterly collaboration with the same string trio in Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E flat major on the previous evening.

Other manifestations of the Festival’s Hungarian theme included Collins’s nicely choreographed performance of the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs, and an engaging opening concert by Irish pianist Séan Morgan-Rooney included shorter works from Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, Dohnányi’s Ruralia Hungarica, and half a dozen of Kodály’s piano pieces.  At the other end of the Festival, Collins and Klára Würtz performed five of Kurtág’s Játékok for four hands, including the fiendish “Hommage à Sárközy”. Würtz also presented a polished performance of the four character pieces that comprise Bartók’s Op. 14 Piano Suite, but struggled to meet the simultaneous challenges of large leaps, dare-devil speed and high note accuracy in the outer movements of his solo Sonata (1926).  Mind you, even Bartók himself fell before those combined challenges, and quietly dropped the work from his active repertory after a few years.  It was on Würtz, too, that the honour was bestowed of concluding the Festival, with a spirited performance — full of folk colours and fine embellishments — of Kodály’s thorny piano version of his Dances of Marosszék, now better known in its orchestral clothing.

Rounding out the Festival were three contrasting cameo concerts, less connected with Hungarian focus.  Fortepianist, Kristian Bezuidenhout, just announced as Principal Guest Director of London’s “period chamber orchestra”, The English Consort,  brought to New Ross his own Paul McNulty reproduction of an 1805 instrument by Viennese maker Anton Walter.  On it he presented works by Beethoven (two rondos), Haydn (a variations movement) and Mozart (the Sonata in B flat major of 1783). Compared with a large modern Steinway this wonderful instrument — in Bezuidenhout’s capable hands and pedalling — demonstrated how much was lost, as well as gained, by the later developments of the piano.  The poignant late Haydn alternating variations conveyed a bloodless depth of emotions denied to modern pianos, just as the the finale of the Mozart sonata, in its cadenza, demonstrated admirably the passionate, silvery bravura of which these straight-stringed instruments are capable.

A second cameo came from twenty-year-old Elizaveta Ukrainskaia, last year’s winner of the European Piano Competition. Her hour-long recital — a nine-movement suite, originally for harpsichord, by Rameau; Schubert’s Hungarian Melody (1824); and Prokofiev’s ten-movement Cinderella Suite — through its many miniatures demonstrated neat technique, faultless memory and apt character depiction.  It remained for her final item, Liszt’s twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, to dispel any possible notions of being “lightweight”.  Because of illness, a third cameo concert, from David Greilsammer, director of the Geneva Camerata, had to be cancelled, but Collins stepped in with four Chopin noctures, well matched to the concert’s late-night scheduling.

This short, intense festival in New Ross is a hidden gem.  Its exposure of well and less known Hungarian compositions and performers never faltered.  Perhaps one day it will even outrival the Kennedy legacy as New Ross’s greatest claim to fame.”

Malcolm Gillies, London-based musicologist and critic

2016 reviews

“The 11^th New Ross Piano Festival offers an eclectic choice of programmes in the agreeable acoustic of St Mary’s Church. In two back-to-back events, I catch all of this year’s musicians. In Bach’s 1st Partita, artistic director Finghin Collins brings a carefree air to the dancing Courante as it slips merrily along. His Sarabande is stately but never stodgy while hopping Minuets precede the vitality of his final Gigue.”

Pat O’Kelly, Sunday Independent

“The eleventh New Ross Piano Festival continued to attract audiences and quality musicians to enjoy three days of wonderful music in times that are still difficult for the arts. The concerts are well put together, and I for one am glad that the ‘new music’ content of the new compositions to celebrate the Ros Tapestry is completed.”

Liam Murphy, Munster Express

2015 reviews

“The Ros Tapestry, a community project that was developed by more than 150 volunteers, is a celebration of the history of New Ross, a latter-day Bayeux for the southeast of Ireland. The Ros Tapestry Suite, commissioned by the New Ross Piano Festival, is not just a musical celebration of the tapestry and the events remembered in its 15 panels, but is also a cross-section of composition in Ireland in the second decade of the 21st century.”

Michael Dervan, Irish Times

“Celebrating its 10th anniversary in St Mary’s Church, the New Ross Piano Festival continues its established pattern of programme diversity and eclectic virtuosi mix.”

Pat O’Kelly, Irish Independent

“Once upon a time all roads led to Rome; but not so this past weekend in Barrowside New Ross whose steep and narrow medieval streets led unerringly to the platform of the town’s 10th Piano Festival. They have done so for a decade now and over those years they’ve played their part in a masterclass of musical experience. New York might have Carnegie Hall and London the Wigmore, but New Ross has St. Mary’s Church, standing contentedly on the site of Norman knight William Marshall’s earlier 13th century ecclesiastical building, and erected before the days of acoustic engineering. St. Mary’s interior resonates with a sound unequalled by its competitors to the delight of composer, musician and audience alike.”

Jeremy Hill, Echo Newspapers

“Finghin Collins got the 10th New Ross Piano Festival off to a splendid start at the Parish Church with a Beethoven Concerto with the RTE Concert Orchestra. The audience loved the lyrical, and expansive work where the piano was gentle in the Largo and the orchestra had the majestic sweep of an autumnal breeze. There was a pleasing almost dreamlike feeling ending in a triumphant orchestral flourish.”

Liam Murphy, Munster Express

2014 reviews

“If you’re a festival director performing in your own festival, you’re like a player-manager in football: the sole aim of your team selection has to be winning. You can’t fear being upstaged by the players you select. What you can do – what Kenny Dalglish did in Liverpool, for example, and what pianist and artistic director Finghin Collins did at his New Ross Piano Festival last weekend – is set the bar high with your own performance.”

Michael Dungan, Irish Times

“Under astute artistic director Finghin Collins the 9th New Ross Piano Festival broadens its remit by inserting music for piano and winds in its programmes for the first time. In two festival events I hear Dublin-based Cassiopeia Winds, led by flautist Caitríona Ryan and joined by the ubiquitous Collins, in works from the French repertoire.”

Pat O’Kelly, Sunday Independent

“The Ros Tapestry, seen by many as culturally related to the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, became an important element of the recent New Ross Piano Festival. Defying the national pecuniary straights and reduced grant funding, the festival committee commissioned, from its own resources, five short compositions for piano by five Irish composers. Each piece was to be a response to an individual tapestry in the series of fifteen panels; the commissioners’ only restraint on the composers was a time limit of five minutes.”

Jeremy Hill, Echo Newspapers

2013 reviews

“Behind the vision of New Ross Piano Festival’s artistic director, Finghin Collins, lies an instinct for access and inclusion; and so it was that seven years old Jane Sutton played the first notes of this year’s festival weekend with precocious aplomb, her Dvorak melody stirring the embers of fire to come from the professionals. Lily Hayes and Clare Spollen stood out among the 24 other young musicians from the South East at the opening event which gave them all a taste of a Steinway concert grand piano and the valuable experience of performing live before an audience.”

Jeremy Hill, Wexford Echo

“The Russian slant on this year’s New Ross Piano Festival comes more from the visiting artists than the composers represented although Rakhmaninov, Shostakovich and Boris Tchaikovsky (unrelated to Piotr Il’yich) dominate the events I attend. However, artistic director Finghin Collins’ astute programme planning means hearing the Russian visitors, each at different stages in their careers, as well as Collins himself, in back-to-back recitals.”

Pat O’Kelly, Irish Independent

“Due to a very busy weekend programme of arts, music and musical theatre I was only able to attend one day of the excellent New Ross Piano Festival. Artistic Director, Finghin Collins and his dedicated committee have established this festival firmly in the Irish calendar, and the performers have brought a wonderful international quality to the event. I know these are difficult times, but soon this niche festival will have to expand on its four days of events, and perhaps consider moving the St. Michael’s Theatre. There needs to be consolidation, and I am sure St. Michael’s could do with the business.”

Liam Murphy, The Munster Express

2012 reviews

“Last year in September was my second visit to the small, picturesque town of New Ross in County Wexford, Ireland. Pianofiles cannot ask for much more than a festival across four full days. What is more, the acoustic in St Mary’s Church, the main concert venue, rivals many of the great chamber-music acoustics available. 2011’s series was a highly enjoyable spotlight on works for two pianos. Last year, the first evening concert was given by Irish jazz pianist Fergus Sheil. His delicate and sensitive touch served the succession of standards beautifully, full of carefully voiced chords and intimate improvisations.”

Francesco Burns for ClassicalSource.com

2011 reviews

“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.”

Jeremy Hill, New Ross Echo

“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.”

Kimon Daltas, INTERNATIONAL PIANO REVIEW

“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.”

BBC Music Magazine

2010 reviews

“The brochure for the 2010 New Ross Piano Festival offers 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.”

Chloe Cutts, International Piano

“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.”

Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone

“Here is a wonderful example of how a little inspiration and a large amount of collective enthusiasm can go a very long way.”

Chloe Cutts, Classical Music

2009 reviews

“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.”

Pat O’Kelly, Irish Independent

“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.”

Jeremy Hill, Wexford Echo

“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.”

Dick O’Riordan, Sunday Business Post