Coffee Concert – Triskel, Cork, Ireland

This specially filmed concert will become available to view here at 11am on Saturday 4th July 2020. The link will be shared on our social media, or you can check-in to this event page to watch it here.

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For this concert we almost come home, stopping off at the Triskel in Cork, who have generously hosted a performance by the early music group, Dagda Ensemble, led by violinist Caitriona O’Mahony. This Ensemble have had to improvise as their singer and cellist were at opposite ends of the country and unable to travel to Cork and rehearsal opportunities for the other three were limited.

They open their concert with the hypnotic and ever-popular Ciaccona by the Venetian composer Tarquinio Merula, the two violins singing above the ground bass. Another Venetian from the early 17^th Century, Dario Castello, was one of the first composers of instrumental sonatas full of brilliant decorative flourishes. The core of this programme is three pieces by two very different seventeenth century women composers, the violin-playing nun, Isabella Leonarda, and the protégée of Louis XIV at the Court of Versailles, Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre. Leonarda spent her life in the convent at Navara, composing some 250 works in her lifetime. As with this concert, her music would have only been heard from behind a screen. Her regular use of dance tunes must surely have been scandalous.

De la Guerre was a youthful prodigy, thus her presence at Versailles. She was the first French woman to write an opera and to publish harpsichord sonatas. Like later women composers, she used to host musical salons in her own home. Her elegant and substantial sonatas that combine Italian influences within a French style of writing must have featured in her salons,. The concert concludes with another Ciaconna, this time by the famous Corelli.

All works performed by Caitríona O'Mahony Marja Gaynor Kieran Finnegan