The fourth and final part of Frank Corcoran’s Quasi series will receive its premiere in July.

Quasi una fuga will be performed at the MBNA Shannon International Festival in a concert by the Irish Chamber Orchestra. The work is a one-movement, 10-minute-long work for the full complement of the ICO’s 18-strong string section although Frank Corcoran insists that it is neither a fugue nor neo-baroque. Instead, it draws its inspiration from ‘my love/hatred for all the fugues I’ve ever had to compose or study as a young music student’.

But the work, Corcoran adds, ‘is also my tribute to counterpoint and to the towering 20th-Century masterpieces for string orchestra that gave me hope (obviously Bartók and Ligeti, but also Lutoslawski’s pioneering Preludes And Fugue).’

The work, which will be performed in St Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick on 13 July, ‘has a “subject” with its counterpoint; its exposition ascends like a Boeing 727. Smithereens and bits of it saturate the whole thing while morphing all the time until, at the end, it magically metamorphoses into the Old Celtic hymn Ibunt Sancti which, I like to think, was the chant that St. Brendan and his 14 monks sang while preparing their fish supper on the back of a North Atlantic whale somewhere up near Greenland!’

The MBNA Shannon International Music Festival runs from 11-15 July in various venues in Limerick. It includes performances by Sinéad O’Connor, Honor Heffernan, Doreen Curran, the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet and the National Chamber Choir.

For further details, see the Calendar or visit www.irishchamberorchestra.info.

Posted: 25 June 2007