The Galway Early Music Festival which will take place in the city on Friday and Saturday, May 26 and 27, will celebrate crossroads.

“Crossroads are magical,” says the festival’s director Maura Ó Cróinín. “They pose the question of what direction to follow and invite the exploration of new destinations. They are places for music and dancing and for meeting friends.”

It’s an apt theme as Maura will step down as artistic director this year, having been at the helm since the event was founded in the mid-1990s.

This year’s festival will involve two days of instrumental and vocal music, dance and “a meeting of old and new friends in a programme that celebrates the amazing growth in early music performance in Galway and Ireland”.

Galway’s international soprano Aisling Kenny will join renowned historical harpist Siobhán Armstrong to perform Si dolce tormento: Songs of Love and Loss on Friday night in St Joseph’s Church, Presentation Road. This will feature work by Purcell, Monteverdi, Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini and even music attributed to Anne Boleyn.

On Saturday night, the female Galway choir, Vox Orbis, directed by Mark Keane, will be joined by soprano Helen Hancock to perform Taking the high road: Women’s voices in Renaissance & Baroque music. This celebration of polyphony, madrigals and arias from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be in St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church and it will feature the launch of Mark Keane’s new, specially-made harpsichord from Italy.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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