This remarkable recital opens with a short Duo for violin and flute by Irish composer Anna Murray. Bram van Sambeek then gives the Irish premiere of Weinberg’s solo bassoon Sonata. This is a full-scale, four movement work demanding extraordinary virtuosity from the performer. Ligeti’s Solo Viola Sonata is another legendary work played for us by Festival favourite Dana Zemtsov. Tongue in cheek Ligeti describes his influences as Bach’s three solo Sonatas and the Hungarian translation of Alice in Wonderland. We are not meant to understand, just to listen.

About Crosstalk

Crosstalk attempts to capture the feeling of trying to communicate across distance, both physical and experiential. As an Irish person living in Japan, my experience of the Covid19 pandemic is one of feeling split and pulled between two worlds: that of my own real lived experience of the reality in Japan, and that of my friends and family in Europe. While staying indoors during the State of Emergency, the online world became sometimes more real, and venturing out led to sensations of extreme cognitive dissonance. Communication between these two worlds was sometimes easy, oiled by the shared stresses and cares of the situation, and sometimes jagged, broken by the different on-the-ground experiences of it in different places. Imagine the now-ubiquitous problems of digital conferencing, with crosstalk, connection difficulties and misunderstanding, but applied to the process of communication itself. The piece takes the form of a kind of conversation, moving between these broken fragments and smooth easy chatting, punctuated by moments of an agonising pull between two places.