West Cork Chamber Music Festival Returns to Celebrate its 25th Anniversary

West Cork Music has announced the programme for this summer's West Cork Chamber Music Festival which runs in Bantry from 24 June - 3 July. After two years of uncertainty and cancelled festivals, the Festival can finally celebrate its 25th anniversary.

The programme is packed with more than seventy concerts featuring sixty professional musicians and over twenty students, plus an extensive masterclass series of up to five classes a day. A Fringe series from Glengarriff to Skibbereen, taking in the Islands, will run alongside the main Festival programme.

The core of the 2022 Festival is built around four top international String Quartets - Pavel Haas Quartet from Prague, Danel Quartet from Belgium, Signum Quartet from Germany, and Doric Quartet from London - and a series of major cycles from Biber and Bach to Weinberg via Haydn, late Schubert and Bartók.

The Festival is renowned for supporting young musicians at every stage of their development and this year welcomes a number of Stars of the Future including Cork violinist Mairéad Hickey, pianist Nathalia Milstein, cellist Ella van Poucke, and violinist Diamanda Dramm.

Much-loved repertoire features from morning to night and includes works by Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, and much more, while audience can also immerse themselves in a wide selection of contemporary music including world and Irish premieres, special Festival commissions and three concerts by the acclaimed Crash Ensemble.

The rich and varied repertoire for woodwinds will be explored by the Orsino Quintet led by Adam Walker, and BBC-sponsored Ensemble Molière will join Irish mezzo soprano Rachel Kelly on Friday's programme which has a strong towards the French and Italian Baroque.

Fiddle player and Artistic Director of Masters of Tradition, Martin Hayes returns for a special late night performance while American violinist Ariadne Daskalakis joins Ensemble Vintage Köln and poet Ruth Padel for Biber's Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, fifteen sonatas played over three days.

This year's line-up will also include cellists Johannes Moser and Alexander Kovalev; viola players Dana Zemtsov and Sara Fervández; percussionist Alex Petcu; pianists Anna Fedorova, Zoltán Fejérvári, Julius Drake and Joseph Havlat; and many more.

Audiences are reassured that their safety is of paramount importance with measures including reduced number of seats, the removal of intervals, and ventilation.

General booking opens Wednesday 6th April. Full programme can be found on www.westcorkmusic.ie

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