Entertainment
The highs and lows of love central theme of Ultan’s second album
The Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie
Galway’s Ultan Conlon celebrates the release of Songs Of Love So Cruel with a show in Róisín Dubh on Friday, October 4. Ultan’s second album is a set of ten songs that explores the highs and lows that love brings.
“With my first album, Bless Your Heart, I was writing for years,” he says. “I started making my first album when I was 28, so I had a big back catalogue. So I found it hard to piece things together, to make a cohesive album. I had songs from different eras.”
“When I finished up that album, I decided the next thing I wanted was to have a real theme to an album, and have the songs all belong in the one place.”
Conlon’s latest opens with the In The Mad; appropriately enough, it was the first song he wrote for the record.
“It’s about an older man looking back on his life, married with kids and he’d turned into a bitter old man,” Ultan says. “He doesn’t connect with his wife and kids any more, but he’s trying to. There’s a line in the middle eight where he says he’ll ‘quote poetry and sing songs of love so cruel.’ When I wrote that long, it kind of jumped at me.”
“The rest of the songs followed, I stayed to that theme,” he adds. “A lot of it was personal as well, looking at relationships and people who have lasted the test of time. Everything was on the same page, and the title came early, so I wrote the rest of the album with that in mind.”
Did Ultan find it tricky sticking to the theme?
“It was almost like a project, I wanted to get to the end of that. A lot of the time I found myself drifting down another road, writing a song that didn’t suit the album. At times I was going ‘feck it, why did I commit myself to this?’ But by the end I was happy I did stick to it.”
Ultan started off recording his Songs Of Love So Cruel in Grouse Lodge, Westmeath, did some more work in Galway, took it to London and then came back to Galway again.
“You can imagine at that point, I couldn’t see the wood from the trees,” he says.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
A weekend of plein-air painting will take place in Kinvara in early June. The not-for-profit community arts event is being organised by members of the Kinvara Area Visual Artists (KAVA) group and will be led by experienced artists and teachers
Over the Bank Holiday weekend, participants will gather to explore the beauty and culture of the village and surrounding areas, including Thoor Ballylee and the Burren.
The tutors are Steve Browning, Geraldine Walsh, Róisín Curé and Mavis Gormally, who will provide seven full-day workshops in three different locations.
These are suitable for artists who work in oil, acrylic or watercolour. There will also be an exhibition space where participants can show work completed over the weekend. People can also engage in informal paint-outs and enjoy social activities and local attractions.
Steve Browning’s workshops in oils and acrylics will take place in Kinvara Village and the Burren. Steve, who is originally from the UK, initially worked as an art director in London and Dublin. He began painting at weekends, before becoming a fulltime artist. His work has been shown in London, at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts in Belfast. It’s in collections in the UK, USA and Ireland. He has won prizes at the Dublin Plein Air Festival and Wexford’s Art in the Open Festival and has also been a finalist in the prestigious Plein Air Magazine of America’s annual art competition for three years in a row, winning the best acrylic painting award in 2022.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
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Grammy-nominated Ukrainian-British violist Maxim Rysanov, multi-award-winning Russian violinist Nikita Boriso-Glebsky and rising cello star Dóra Kokas from Hungary will be in concert in Clifden’s Station House Theatre next Tuesday, March 21, at 8pm.
Their show is part of a national tour of Ireland, presented by Music Network.
They will perform Mozart’s only string trio, Beethoven’s Trio in G major and a work by Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova which aims to highlight the unity of sound that a string trio can create. A new commission, written by award-winning Irish composer Ed Bennett for Music Network, will complete the programme.
Maxim Rysanov has a worldwide reputation as a violist and conductor, often combining both roles in concerts. He has featured on stage with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Mariinsky in St Petersburg, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Moscow Philharmonic, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Arts Week with Judy Murphy
Oranmore-based soprano Helen Hancock will lead a night of music and song by composers including Schubert, Schumann, and Strauss this Saturday, March 18, for St Patrick’s Weekend.
The concert, entitled The Lark in the Clear Air will also feature a host of Irish tunes. It takes place in Druid’s Mick Lally Theatre on Saturday, starting at 8pm when Helen will be accompanied by Italian pianist Annalisa Monticelli and American clarinettist, Berginald Rash
The programme will feature Schubert’s Shepherd on a Rock and Arnold Cooke’s Songs of Innocence, both written for soprano, clarinet, and piano.
Shepherd on a Rock was composed in 1828, during the last months of Schubert’s life, and explores themes of longing, the arrival of spring, and journeying to the beloved. Cooke’s Songs of Innocence was inspired by the poetry of 19th century English poet and artist, William Blake.
Themes of nature and the cycle of life will be further explored in Strauss’s and Clara Schumann’s songs for soprano and piano, including Die Stille Lotosblume and Zueignung.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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