Concorde to perform in Hong Kong in November

New music ensemble Concorde will travel to Hong Kong for a concert on Saturday 4 November in the San Wan Ho Civic Centre. The concert, ‘New Music from Ireland’ is at the invitation of Avant Music Group Association and is supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Culture Ireland.

The concert will be preceded by a talk about Irish music past and present by Dr Jane O’Leary, director of Concorde, and Dr Kerry Houston, Head of Academic Studies at DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama. The programme will feature two new works by Hong Kong composers Yip Kim Fung and Alex Au Tin Yung written specially for this event and premiered in Dublin at the Hugh Lane Gallery by Concorde on October 8. Hong Kong composer Chin Ting Chan, who teaches at Ball State University in Indiana, USA, will also be featured. The Irish works on the programme are by David Fennessy, Ed Bennett, Linda Buckley, Jane O’Leary and Judith Ring.

Poetry and landscape are the focus of these works. The Hong Kong composers look to writings from the past, combining these memories with contemporary instrumental idioms. The Irish works are diverse, focussing on the fragile dandelion plant, a slowly emerging sunrise, Nordic landscapes, the monstrous sounds of a bass clarinet, and the ghosts of the past who reside in the building that is now the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin.