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Irish Examiner
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
A vision for West Cork: Plans progress on €20m arts and cultural hub
How did you get a theorbo onto an airplane? You buy it a seat. It might sound like a line from a bad cracker joke but it was a very real problem for West Cork Music, the organisers of the West Cork Chamber Festival, which got underway on Friday heralding a three-festival season worth €4.74m annually to the local economy. 'The theorbo is a kind of lute but it stands about seven or eight foot high. It's also known as a giraffe in the trade,' says West Cork Music founder and chief executive Francis Humphrys, who was busy doing his own final boarding pre-festival checks this week. 'Instruments can't go in the hold. The air pressure and the temperature in the hold is completely different. If you put them in the hold, the wood can crack, and these are instruments that can be worth millions.' Francis recently turned 80 but is as busy as ever. Last year, the three festivals - the West Cork Chamber Festival, the West Cork Literary Festival, and Masters of Tradition - sold a combined 15,922 tickets, the highest combined total yet, worth €259,811. Ticket sales from the Chamber Festival brought in €125,294; the Literary Festival recouped €84,850 in ticket sales while Masters of Tradition brought in €49,667. Irish fiddler and Masters of Tradition artistic director Martin Hayes outside St. Brendan's Church in Bantry. Picture: Karlis Dzjamko/Alamy Live News But it wouldn't be a real festival without drama. In 2024, a strike by Aer Lingus pilots affected flights just as visiting performers were making their way to Ireland. Another hurdle to negotiate, for performers and for visitors. Getting musicians and their instruments to Cork is always a worry, like the theorbo dilemma, and also a practical financial consideration. 'A string quartet going on an airplane will work out as five seats because the cellist must have an extra seat. Some international airlines refuse to take a cello, even when the seat has been booked. Sometimes, it's at the pilot's discretion. Cellists worldwide worry, every time they get on a plane, because they don't know if they're going to be allowed fly with their instrument.' Organising a chamber festival should be all about the music and tuning to a perfect fifth. Instead, someone must be looking after the purse strings. Yet in challenging times for the arts, West Cork Music has the data to show the monetary lift that festivals bring. An economic impact assessment carried out by Prof Eleanor Doyle at UCC's Dept of Economics estimates the three festivals brought in an estimated €4.74m to the region last year, including direct expenditure of €2.8m through local accommodation, catering, transport, and other local services, up 30% on 2023. 'Relative to the estimated aggregate impact, every euro invested by these agencies in West Cork Music generated €8.50 in economic activity,' said Prof Doyle. This represents seriously good value for money for the €557,500 in State-derived funding from the Arts Council (€445,000), Fáilte Ireland (€65,000), and Cork County Council (€47,500). Undertaking economic analysis of the three festivals puts their value in perspective, says Francis. 'We've been carrying these out since the economic crash 15 years ago. I realised that politicians were only going to listen to us if we had an economic presence. They used to just think of us as a drain on national resources.' The Chamber Festival is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and has earned a reputation for world-class music in breathtaking surroundings. On Saturday night, the Ardeo Quartet and Barry Douglas perform the main evening concert at beautiful Bantry House, in a concert that will be broadcast live on Lyric FM and to millions more across Europe and beyond, via the European Broadcasting Union. Yet locals and visitors in Bantry can attend the concert for as little as €14. Other events are free. The festival is headquartered in Bantry, but fringe and other festival events on the programme take in Cork Airport, Glengarriff, Skibbereen, Ahakista, Ballydehob, Schull, and islands like Sherkin, Heir, Bere, and Whiddy. Just a few weeks later, the West Cork Literary Festival directed by Eimear Herlihy will bring a different creative strand - not to mention a dabble of stardust from the likes of Graham Norton, Richard E Grant, and Neil Jordan - as Irish and world authors and guests come to Bantry and its environs. In August, Masters of Tradition, curated by Martin Hayes, will complete the eclectic summer season. An architect design of the interior for the proposed cultural hub and music centre in Bantry. The next step in the development of West Cork Music is to create a permanent music, education, and civic space in Bantry. This will include an auditorium, and an education centre, adjacent to Bantry Library, creating a new cultural hub for the town, and indeed for West Cork. The total cost is estimated at €20m. The concert hall will be used for performances of chamber music, folk, jazz, and traditional music from Ireland and other cultures. It will be a purpose-built space: a warm acoustic, with modulations, particularly around the stage, helping to disperse sound and reduce the likelihood of echoes or resonances. Variable acoustics systems, such as trackable drapes on the side walls will reduce the reverberance of the venue. This will be key for spoken word events where speech clarity is of prime concern, and for amplified music where this will help control loudness and improve sound quality from loudspeakers. Other uses for this space will include touring opera, theatre, and dance productions, and local community and school activities. The auditorium will host the festivals, and will also be suitable for conferences, lectures, informal talks, and masterclasses. The seating capacity is 270 seats. Local businesses have been hugely supportive. Land has been earmarked near Bantry Library and the project is currently going through the planning process, says West Cork Music venue development manager Siobhan Burke. 'The potential to create stable facilities where you can make that economic impact count year-round is phenomenal," she said. "One of the great things about West Cork Music is it sits in an absolute sweet spot between the arts, tourism, and rural regeneration. All of these things that we would like to see flourish in rural Ireland are in some way enabled or supported by the different strands of this project.' Designs for the new centre in Bantry have been created by award-winning Irish architects McCullough Mulvin. Fundraising is continuing, with around €750,000 of a €1m target achieved to get the project through the labyrinthine pre-planning process. A thriving Friends Scheme is helping provide support for ongoing costs, and West Cork Music is exploring the possibility of corporate sponsorship for its festivals. An design for the interior for the proposed cultural hub and music centre in Bantry, which would be located near Bantry Library. It is expected to go for planning by the end of this year. If that gets the green light, applications for grant funding can be made. All going to plan, the new hub will be complete in time for the 2029 festival. 'For Francis, it has genuinely always been part of the plan: to create a way for people to access the arts year-round in West Cork,' said Siobhan. For a man who started a music festival 30 years ago from the kernel of an idea while playing classical music to his milking cows, Francis knows keeping economic realities in play are always key. He's looking to the future - "I've always wanted to put on a world music festival here" - but aware of the importance of the present. 'All of us in the arts, even West Cork Music which is quite a substantial organisation, are stretched to the limit,' he says. "If we break even, we're doing brilliantly. Last year, we more or less broke even. At this stage, it's difficult to know what the final figure for this year will be, with the best part of 20% of box office receipts coming in during the festival. I had a pacemaker fitted last year and I put it down to box office trauma!" "The Literary Festival will reach its target before it starts and they'll sell another €10,000 or €15,000 worth of tickets during the festival. Masters of Tradition is the same, they will almost certainly reach their target before Martin arrives. 'That's the beauty with three festivals in one organisation, you spread your risk that way.'
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Francis Humphrys: Magic moments from 30 years of West Cork Chamber Music Festival
'I'm not sure I could pull something out of my rather decrepit brain,' protests Francis Humphrys when asked to list some highlights of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which this year celebrates its 30th birthday. And the response can only be: pull the other one. He may recently have posted his own 80th birthday but Humphrys still seems as sharp as ever, and has just the finishing touches to the official programme for this year's festival, which begins on June 27 next and continues until July 6. The latest programme has 146 pages; by comparison, the edition for the first Festival back in 1995 had 56 pages - 'which wasn't bad'. Humphrys is chief executive officer of West Cork Music, which plans and stages three festivals every year in and around Bantry: The Chamber Music Festival, the Literary Festival, and the Masters of Tradition Festival, and his memories of the very first Festival - complete with his property deeds in the bank as collateral - are still vivid and coloured by the topsy turvy adventures of the years that have since passed, marked by fretting over budgets and scoring new, emerging and big names from the world of classical music and beyond, successfully cloistering them in West Cork for a few weeks. It's quite an achievement, even if he jokes that '30 years is chicken feed'. Below are some of the highlights, but as he explains: 'The most captivating concerts in the festival are the late nights, especially the ones in Bantry House. We've got the candles lit and all that. It works, it works very well." Bantry House provides an impressive setting for many of the events at West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Picture: Denis Scannell 1995: Seamus Heaney "I think the first festival is a place to go, because what's interesting there is the seeds of the Literary Festival are also sown, because our big event was Seamus Heaney coming, and that was the year that Seamus won the Nobel Prize. A number of gods were smiling on us that year. "I did invite Seamus, but long before the Nobel Prize came on, but that really put us on the radar, in a way. I don't think we would have been otherwise. Bantry House [used as a venue] was a great attraction. "I asked Seamus to come and read a long poem of his called Squarings [made up of 48 12-line poems]. And we did it alongside a very, very good cellist playing Bach's last Cello Suite. So there is a movement of the cello suite, and then Seamus would read, and then another movement, and Seamus would read, and so on. It was a packed house, and it went very well. He's such a gentleman, that man. He was wonderful. After he'd won the Nobel prize, he rang me up and said, 'Francis, I'm still coming'. That was good. Obviously, he was being dragged all over the world at that particular point in time." Seamus Heaney on one of his visits to Bantry. Picture: Eddie O'Hare Ten years later, and Seamus Heaney's return to Bantry again lit up the festival. "The thing about 2005, which was the 10th festival, it was also Cork Capital of Culture [European City of Culture]. We put on some fabulous programs, of which the Seamus piece was one. They gave us a bit of extra money to expand the artistic program. But it's always been like that with a festival. I go to these board meetings. We have a board, and I go to the meeting and say, the money will come. It just sort of parachutes in at the last minute, but, I mean, you really had to work on that European funding, but we had done the groundwork, if you like, we were there already. We just had to put it down in a funding application." 2010: Alina Ibragimova Russian-British violinist Alina Ibragimova playing in Bantry. "It's just fantastic having people come to Bantry. It really is, it's people who play to full houses in the great halls all over Europe. With Alina Ibragimova, she is another violinist who's been with us. The first time she came, she came outside the festival and she did all the Bach solo Sonatas and all the Bach solo pieces, the solo violin. She did them for us in the local churches. And not that long ago, she did them all in the Albert Hall to an audience of 1,000 people. And she comes almost every year. She has a string quartet who are coming back this year. They were here last year, she's been here almost every year now for 10 or 15 years.' Humphrys recalls a show many years ago at Bantry House when Ibragimova performed a late night Schubert piano triumvia: 'People came out ... I mean… people were dumbfounded.' 2011: Nicola Benedetti Nicola Benedetti was one of the headliners at the 2011 festival. (Photo by Jeff) "Well, that obvious special person was Nicola Benedetti. The reason why I try and try to steer away a bit from this is that there are names that are famous to me and famous to chamber musicians, but the rest of the world hasn't heard of them. I think that's the problem with chamber music. It is a niche area. Nicola runs the Edinburgh Festival now. She's internationally famous, a fabulous musician herself, and she's done a huge amount for development of young musicians in England, and in the UK generally. "You need people like her, big names like her, to generate private funding. She was great. She came two or three years. She came first with her then-boyfriend, who's a cellist, and they enjoyed being here. She could sit outside and not be bothered by people because she wasn't really known over here, you know, the music audience would have known who she was, but it's a great thing. You know, in Ireland, celebrities don't get pestered in the way they do elsewhere." 2023: Candle-light concerts "The festival keeps an archive of all the works played and who played them. Currently after 29 Festivals there are 3,200 entries, ranging from under 50 works the first year to over 120 in recent years. Of course many works get repeated several times, especially the unrivalled quartets by that wave of composers beginning with the founder of the string quartet Haydn, his friend Mozart, Haydn's student Beethoven, who upset their orderly world and of course the song-writer Schubert. "My favourite concerts have always been the candle-lit late-nights, a focus on a single work, the darkening sky outside and a deeply attentive audience. Two years ago the Paris-based (Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam are the great music cities of our time) Quatuor Ardeo, who return this year, gave a mesmerising performance of a Beethoven quartet composed in 1806, when Napoleon was imposing his will on Europe with his armies. This particular quartet, his Ninth, builds to a stupendous last movement climax delivered in overwhelming fashion by these four young women. Thus their return this year." The Vanbrugh Quartet were regulars at the festival. Picture: Des Barry 2025: New visitors Can you have a favourite memory from something that haunt happened yet? Maybe you can, and if so, it's testament to the power of music. "It's not exactly the festival, but I was 80 last year, and my daughter, unbeknown to me, arranged a birthday party, and she also brought in a string quartet, and they played, and all the neighbours were there. And one of the neighbours was so taken by the performance by this string quartet that she's booked to come to a concert in the festival. So it does reach. You just have to get people to hear, to listen. You have to drag them in somehow or other. And that's where Bantry House came in, in the early days: people came to hear classical music in the kind of surroundings that it would have been played in 100 years ago or 200 years ago. "What we found actually since covid is that our international audience has halved, they're not coming any more for many, many reasons. And I think that's true with all tourism, but our national audience has doubled. So people are kind of thinking, yes, this might be fun to go to." The 30th West Cork Chamber Music Festival takes place from June 27 to July 6. See
Irish Independent
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Kerry Writer's Museum announce full programme of events for Listowel Literary Festival
The full programme for this year's Literary Festival, released on Monday (April 28), includes a host of events that will be of high interest to those into literature, history and the arts. Some of the renowned writers who will appear at the festival include award-winning authors Fergal Keane, Lisa Harding, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Jess Kidd, Julian Borger and Rónán Hession. Celebrated musicians Andy Irvine and Mike Hanrahan will also speak and play some of their finest tunes at individual events. Ireland's oldest literary festival will also feature Kerry writers including Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Victoria Kennefick, Eileen Sheehan, Paddy Bushe and Lorraine Carey. The upcoming celebration is the result of a collaboration between three leading local cultural institutions; Kerry Writers' Museum, Listowel Writers' Week and St. John's Theatre and Arts Centre. The festival has been awarded €44,520 in funding under the Literature in Listowel Grant Scheme, administered by Kerry County Council and supported by the Arts Council. Cara Trant, executive director of Kerry Writers' Museum, said festival organisers are honoured to receive this 'vital support'. 'The Listowel Literary Festival allows us to celebrate the written word while continuing our work to support writers at all stages of their careers – especially those rooted in the cultural and creative life of Kerry,' Ms Trant said. "It builds on the town's rich literary heritage and brings together our key arts and cultural partners to create something truly special. 'This is a celebration of literature that is both global and deeply rooted in our local community. We look forward to welcoming audiences to a rich and engaging programme in 2025.' ADVERTISEMENT The festival, consisting of readings, interviews, panel discussions, and workshops as well as interactive walks and open mic sessions, will take place from Wednesday, May 28 to Sunday, June 1. Events will take place across venues including the Kerry Writers' Museum and St. John's Theatre, The Listowel Arms Hotel, The Plaza Hall, local pubs, and spaces throughout the town. To view the full festival programme of events, those interested can visit
BBC News
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Faversham: Celebrities to take to stage at literary festival
One of Kent's largest literary festivals gets under way on Literary Festival offers a week-long "eclectic range of speakers and events", its organisers Alison Steadman, who plays Pam in Gavin and Stacey, will be on stage in talking about her life and career to tie in with her autobiography. Other well-known authors visiting the Kent market town include Michael Rosen, actress Dame Harriet Walter, designer Dame Zandra Rhodes and Paralympian Jonnie Peacock. The annual festival, which began in 2018, offers an "exciting mix of well-known authors, leading thinkers, up-and-coming writers, and local talent". As well as guest talks it features writing competitions, workshops, slam poetry and children's events. A spokesperson said: "The quality and scope of the programme is what gets us excited and makes it a festival that people want to come to."The festival runs over nine days at various venues around the town until 2 March.
