Venue: St. Barrahane's Church, Castletownshend, Co. Cork.
Date: Thursday 6 August, 2026, 8pm
Tickets €20
Online (booking fee), at the door, at Thornhill Electrical Skibbereen or text/call 086 226 4797
NEW: At the door only, under 19 FREE.
THE MELIORA QUARTET, NSQF YOUNG ARTISTS CONCERT
Cillian Ó Cathasaigh - violin, Seán Hurley - violin,
Kseniia Yershova - viola, Alina Obreja - cello
Haydn - String Quartet Op.76 No.4 Sunrise [1797]
Webern: Langsamer Satz [1905]
Caroline Shaw - Blueprint [2016]
Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartet in B flat major Op.130 [1826]
The outstanding Meliora Quartet will take part in the Young Musicians Programme at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in June/July and will also be the NSQF Fellowship Quartet at the Concorda Chamber Music Course in July/August, working with the course participants as well as preparing for this tour.
The Sunrise is perhaps the most popular of all Haydn’s wonderful string quartets. Each of its four movements is vividly characterised - the first evoking the rising of the sun, the second prayerful, the third presenting a wild dance and the finale creating imaginative variations around a simple folksong-like theme and building to a virtuosic conclusion.
Webern’s ‘Langsamer Satz’ (slow piece) is a beautiful and passionate love song to his future wife, written in the rich late Romantic soundworld of his teacher Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht.
Pulitzer prize winning composer Caroline Shaw took Beethoven’s quartet Op.18 No.6, as the blueprint of her 2016 quartet of that name and its transformation is both fascinating and entertaining.
The magnificent, epic, opening movement of Beethoven’s B flat major quartet Op.130 is followed by four beautifully crafted and highly contrasted inner movements, culminating in the famous Cavatina of which Beethoven wrote that he had composed it truly in the tears of melancholy. It leads into the quartet’s concluding finale, a good-natured antidote which Beethoven wrote, at his publisher’s request, as an alternative to the quartet’s original last movement, the massive Grosse Fuge.