Live again: Ortús festival returns with chamber music delights in Cork
Mairéad Hickey, one of the organisers of the Ortús Chamber Music Festival in Cork.
Just as his musical career was beginning to pick up steam, the Parisian composer, Ernest Chausson lost control of his bicycle, hit a brick wall, crashed and died. His unfortunate demise in 1899 at the age of only 44 robbed him of a more prominent place in the canon of European fin-de-siecle music.
A friend of illustrious contemporaries Debussy and Faure, only a handful of Chausson’s works have found a place in today’s concert programmes and he is arguably one of the most undervalued and underplayed composers of that era. Fortunately for Irish chamber music fans, there is a rare opportunity to hear Chausson’s unusual Concerto for piano, violin and string quartet when violinist Mairéad Hickey programmes the work as part of the opening concert of the Ortús Festival.
