Running from 24 June – 3 July, the Festival 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 to Weinberg.
Other new works include Sebastian Fagerlund (Woodland Variations for bassoon, string quartet), Deirdre Gribbin (Dark Matter Hunting for string quartet), Roxanna Panufnik (Afghan Dances for clarinet, string quartet) and Finola Merivale (Silent Sweep for violin, cello). The Festival will also feature new works from Crash Ensemble’s Reactions Commissions.
The rich and varied repertoire for woodwinds will be explored by the Orsino Quintet led by Adam Walker with Nicholas Daniel, Matt Hunt, Alec Frank-Gemmill and Bram van Sambeek.
This year’s line-up will also include Irish mezzo soprano Rachel Kelly; cellists Johannes Moser, Ella van Poucke and Alexander Kovalev; violinist Diamanda Dramm; viola players Dana Zemtsov and Sara Fervández; percussionist Alex Petcu; baroque groups Ensemble Molière and Ensemble Köln; Crash Ensemble; pianists Anna Fedorova, Nathalia Milstein, Zoltán Fejérvári, Julius Drake and Joseph Havlat.
Audiences are reassured that their safety is of paramount importance with measures including reduced number of seats, the removal of intervals and air filtration systems in place.