West Cork Chamber Music Festival Will Celebrate 30th Anniversary
Family features throughout this year’s Festival with a number of siblings, married couples and parents and their children sharing the stage.
By: Stephi Wild May. 15, 2025
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a spectacular programme, as eclectic as usual, presenting much-loved favourites alongside world and Irish premieres of contemporary works.
Audience come from throughout Europe and the United States to descend on Bantry for ten days. A number of loyal music-lovers have done so since the first festival in 1996 and feel a part of the Festival family at this intimate yet key date in the European classical music calendar.
Family features throughout this year’s Festival with a number of siblings, married couples and parents and their children sharing the stage.
Celebrating the Festival’s 30th anniversary, the two brothers and two sisters of the Tchalik Quartet fittingly perform the World Premiere of Sam Perkin’s Celebration Quartet in the opening concert in Bantry House on Friday 27 June at 8pm. From a Russian French family, the siblings are making their Bantry debut and will be performing throughout the week.
Australia mezzo soprano Lotte Betts Dean returns to the Festival and joins her father, the viola player and composer Brett Dean for a special recital on Monday 30 June at 4pm in St Brendan’s Church. The programme will feature music by Vaughan Williams, Sally Beamish, Hindemith, Stuart MacRae, Brett Dean and others.
Woodpecker Recorder Quartet bring ‘Bach and the Birds’ to St Brendan’s Hall on Monday 30 June at 2pm. The four virtuoso players present an exciting, choreographed programme of music without spoken word, where the instruments and music weave a story of conflict, friendship & reconciliation. Modern music inspired by birds and bird sounds are mixed with old folk tunes, and of course everyone's favourite Baroque composers Bach and Vivaldi.
Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud, no stranger to the Festival, will be accompanied by his three children Alma, Franz and Hector for a special family concert in St Brendan’s Church on Thursday 3 July at 2pm. They perform a fantastic programme of music by Handel, Mendelssohn, Brahms, a piece by Henning himself and more.
Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon joins forces with her husband, the pianist Ryan McCullough for the Irish Premiere of Katherine Balch’s estrangement in the main evening concert on Friday 4 July in St Brendan’s Church. It’s an unmissable concert packed with international stars.
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