Cork Midsummer Festival: The show must go on, but how?
9 min read A DYNAMIC BLEND OF OUTDOOR AND ONLINE EVENTS RUNS FROM BREAKDANCING TO DOORSTEP PERFORMANCES AS THE CORK MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL WILL MARRY INGENUITY AND FLEXIBILITY, NO MATTER WHAT THE RULES HAPPEN TO BE
Imagine this. You’re standing in Cork city’s Elizabeth Fort, one of 15 socially distanced people, right in the midst of Alex Petcu’s percussion sextet Bangers & Crash, buried by the raw power and immediacy of live percussion, that “immersive, visceral feeling of the music up at the fort”.
Or this: “You’re standing underneath the Port of Cork sign, facing out to the water, the quay, the city, headphones on”, listening to sounds, spoken word, electronic beats, opera, teasing out the life of Kate “Birdie” Conway. “You’ll be encouraged to dance, if you want to… or it’s perfectly acceptable to stand there. It’ll be very interactive.”
Clonmelâs Finding a Voice festival, a festival devoted exclusively to music by women, is happening online this year, the only way thatâs possible for it. The great Japanese marimba player Keiko Abe and percussionist/composer Evelyn Glennie are among the names represented in the opening programme performed by Alex Petcu, who will also play a new work by Elaine Agnew.
There will be songs by Pauline Viardot, marking the bicentenary of the birth of the great French singer and composer, for whom Berlioz made the now-dominant version of Gluckâs Orfeo ed Euridice with Orfeo cast as a mezzo-soprano. Thatâs in concert by soprano Kelley Lonergan, actor Aideen Wylde and pianist Gabriela Mayer.