Kaleidoscope Night in May features the work of Aloys Fleischmann and Garrett Sholdice in Dublin and Cork

Entitled Songs That Fall On The Turn, the monthly series pays homage to the Irish composer, educator and conductor Aloys Fleischmann, and is presented in association with the Goethe-Institut Ireland.

Fleischmann’s setting of four poems by Padraic Colum for soprano and Irish harp, The Poets’ Circuits, will be performed by German soprano Janina Staub and Irish harpist, Clare McCague.

Also on the programme is a new commission for the same instrumentation from composer Garrett Sholdice, who’s paternal grandfather knew Aloys Fleischmann in Cork during the 1950s.  The work, entitled Unter Träumen, takes its title from a German translation of one of the last lines of W. B. Yeats' poem Men Improve with the Years. Garrett Sholdice on the piece:

"As I composed, a Sebaldian nexus of associations took shape in my imagination: the life of German- Irish composer Aloys Fleischmann (1910-1992), my paternal grandfather who knew him in Cork in the 1950s, fragments of my music that I associate with my grandfather (whom I never met), the German origins of my father's side of the family, the voice, singing, the Irish harp, the early-twentieth-century Ireland of W. B. Yeats, my childhood affection for his poetry, his daughter-in-law Gráinne (an Irish harpist and singer for whom Fleischmann composed), history, memory..."

The works will be performed alongside excerpts from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and a programme of works by the Gregory Walkers in a concert in Dublin at 9pm on 6 May at The Odessa Club, and at Crane Lane in Cork on 7 May at 8pm.

Tickets available for the Dublin performance here and at the door for the Cork show.