Galway soprano Helen Hancock is celebrating the launch of her debut album with a series of concerts on both sides of the country – all on the theme of love!

The Dublin-born but Oranmore-based singer welcomes her pianist Paul Cibis back to Ireland from his native Germany for a series of concerts on the back of the release of her debut album Togetherness on Navona Records,

The series begins on Saturday, January 31, at 7.30pm in St Columba’s Church in Ennis, returning to Galway for an afternoon concert in the Hardiman Hotel Ballroom, that Sunday, February 1, at 3pm, and finishing on Thursday, February 5, at 7pm in The Goethe-Institut, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin

The programme includes Frauenliebe und leben (a woman’s love and life). This very famous and moving song cycle explores the ecstasy of early love to engagement and marriage, the birth of children, the pain of loss and the experience of love that continues beyond the grave.

Stunning folksongs from Greece (Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques by Ravel) will bring sunny places to mind.

“If you close your eyes and listen even just to the piano part, it evokes the warmth of the sun on your back and the flowers in the air, you can hear the toll of the bell from the whitewashed church looking out to sea,” reveals Helen.

“I have been wanting to perform these songs for ages and I think the cusp of winter into spring is the perfect time to do it,” she adds.

Songs by Wagner and Fauré sit side by side with Irish songs by Ina Boyle and Thomas Moore – and haunting song settings of the poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin by Kerry composer Criostóir Ó Loingsigh also feature.

Audience favourites from Porgy and Bess and West Side Story also feature as well as an amusing outpouring of frustration from a bridezilla in a Jonathan Dove opera.

Helen Hancock first met Paul Cibis a few years ago when she was in Berlin receiving coaching on an Arts Council Agility Award.

“I was introduced to Paul by my coach Gerhard. I knew immediately that his playing was different. There is a musical telepathy that can happen between a singer and a pianist and it is not something you can conjure: it is either there or it is not and when it is, it is special,” she says.

Not long after that first meeting, Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland Germany invited applications for Zeitgeist Irland 24, a season of Irish Arts in Germany, funded by Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Germany.

Hancock and Cibis devised a programme called Zweisamkeit (Two Togetherness) showcasing songs from Ireland side by side with German lieder on the theme of love and partnership.

It was performed in Würzburg, Germany in June 2024 and included premieres of several pieces by living composers Anne-Marie O’Farrell and Criostóir Ó Loingsigh.

Helen Hancock was one of the lucky recipients of the Basic Income for Artists which enabled her to fund recording an album afterwards in Berlin.

“We had a great programme; I had been friends with Ó Loingsigh for many years and it was a wonderful chance to champion his music,” she says.

“As Ó Loingsigh is himself a pianist, it was not insignificant that he gave his blessing for me to record his songs with another pianist. Recording an album is like birthing a baby but making a first recording with the composer present is even more intense.”

While Helen was still shopping around for a record deal, they worked up a new programme and performed a short tour in Ireland in March 2025.

Having built up that rapport in the recording studio, their musical connection was now even stronger and it was commented on widely by their audiences.

Helen Hancock is hugely excited about the forthcoming concerts.

“That special telepathy means you can take risks in performance, you can go further than you have in rehearsals, you can feed off that heightened energy that you only ever get in live performance.”

Pictured: Paul Cibis…musical telepathy.