The Irish Chamber Orchestra continues its upward flight. The first concert of its spring season - a programme featuring Fergus Johnston's Je goute le jeu . . . and Haydn's Cello Concerto in D with principal cellist Richard Jenkinson as soloist - will be heard in eight venues: Galway's Town Hall Theatre, Tullamore's Court Hotel, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Sligo's Hawk's Well Theatre, Castlebar's Linenhall Arts Centre, Limerick's Belltable Arts Centre, the Aula Maxima of UCC and Skibbereen's Town Hall.
The appearance at IMMA tomorrow week will be the first there since the orchestra reformed in 1995 and moved to its current base in Limerick. IMMA is much more suitable in scale for the orchestra's size than the NCH, and the ICO's complete series of four spring programmes will be given at IMMA as well as at the University Concert Hall in Limerick. Next year, says chief executive John Kelly, the complete series can be expected to run in Cork and Galway as well.
The opening tour is directed by ICO leader and artistic director, Fionnuala Hunt. Thereafter the distinguished line-up includes Jerzy Maksymiuk (founder of the Polish Chamber Orchestra, conducting in March), Jean-Jacques Kantorow (in April), and leading viola-player Bruno Giuranna (in May). Along with rarely-heard pieces by little-known composers Bacewicz and Ghedini, the programmes make a feature of transcriptions of works by great masters - Tchaikovsky's Souvenir De Florence, Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes, Verdi's String Quartet and Schubert's Death And The Maiden Quartet. On the cards for next year is a venture into the baroque, with early music specialist Nicholas McGegan.
This month also sees the launch of a new CD, Silver Apples Of The Moon, a selection of 20th-century Irish pieces - by Arthur Duff, Aloys Fleischmann, TC Kelly, John F. Larchet and Joan Trimble - tinged with a backward-looking fondness for traditional music. In the pipeline is a disc featuring recent the ICO's most recent commissions, and after that the plan is to tackle some of the mainstream string orchestra repertoire in the recording studio.
Kelly is clearly delighted after what he, without a flicker, calls a "hugely successful", 17-concert US tour. He recounts promoter feedback which reported the ICO to Columbia Artists Management in glowing best-gig-for-years terms. The invitation to return in 1999 has already been extended. Before that, there will be a return visit to the Netherlands, and the Gubio Festival in Italy is also beckoning. Between now and the end of May there will be 15 opportunities around the country to catch the ICO in concert. That amounts to one more than you'll find in the NSO's published schedules for the same period!
The ICO's spring tour runs from Thursday, February 5th to Sunday, February 15th. Details from the orchestra, tel: 061-202620.
