West Wicklow Chamber Music Festival Winter Weekend

The combined virtuosity and unbridled enthusiasm of these three world-class musicians promises to make the opening concert of our Winter Weekend 2022 one to remember!

Wicklow musicians Fiachra Garvey and Paul Grennan, and Dublin-born Róisín Walters, have each carved out impressive international performing careers, with prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, and Wigmore Hall regularly popping up on their collective performance schedules.

The trio’s suitably powerful programme starts with Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, a work that combines the elegance of 19th-century Vienna with the flamboyance of a composer at the apex of his chamber music writing. Speaking of composers at the top of their game, this concert will also include the world premiere of Amanda Feery’s The Grip, Part 2 of Ceiliúradh (Celebration), commissioned by the festival to celebrate the fantastic diversity of Irishness today.

Shostakovich wrote his Piano Trio No. 1 when he was just 16, yet it brims with all of the energy, rhythmic drive and wide-arching melodies that would become hallmarks of his mature compositions. "A Trio by Schubert passed across the musical world like some angry comet in the sky". So wrote Schumann of Schubert’s extraordinary Piano Trio No. 2. Grand in scale and heavenly in beauty, this is a masterpiece that pulsates with all the darkness and light of human passion.

Ceiliúradh is a two-part work funded by the Arts Council’s Commission Award, with additional support from Wicklow Arts Office. Part I by Sebastian Adams was premiered at the festival in May 2022.