Culture That Made Me: Evelyn Grant on Mozart, Christy Moore and Tom Climent
Evelyn Grant will host several discussions at West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
Evelyn Grant grew up in Donnycarney, Co Dublin. She married cellist Gerry Kelly aged 19. They have four children, all professional musicians. She is a co-founder and musical director of Cork Pops Orchestra and presents Weekend Drive on RTÉ Lyric FM. She has also produced several radio documentaries for RTÉ. She will conduct a series of talks with artists, including Armida Quartet and Trio Gaspard, at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry, Co Cork, June 23 – July 2. See: www.westcorkmusic.ie.
I love focused listening in an audience. I remember really experiencing it at the Point Theatre with Christy Moore in the early 2000s. His lyrics are so important and everything was crystal clear to me that night. Despite being in a big venue, it had this total intimacy. The lighting, and the sound, were so beautiful, so clear. The audience was totally attentive. They were having fun, but it was one of those intense experiences. It was like absorbing the experience through a spotlight where there's that total connection between the performer and the audience, and back again. That circularity.
I had inspiring teachers at the College of Music in Dublin’s Chatham Row. There used to be a cacophony that came out of the music rooms. I remember asking the director of the College of Music one day, “That's really beautiful – that violin coming from that room. What's the name of that piece?” I must have been very young. He said, “Oh, you're a real romantic. That's Mozart’s violin concerto, #5.” When something touches your heart when you're very young, with that kind of beauty, it never leaves you.
Leo Rowsome was a legend of the uilleann pipes. He lived in Donnycarney, our parish. He taught in the College of Music. I remember sitting on the Number 20 bus coming home with him one day. He told me he went to the Isle of Wight where The Beatles wanted to buy uilleann pipes. He was brought over to advise. With our music education training at that time, it was considered wasting your time if you were improvising. If you were playing pop music, my mother would tell us, “Stop that nonsense and practice your music.” So I loved running into the likes of Leo Rowsome, who was outward-looking.
I first got interested in Gustavo Dudamel through a Venezuelan music education programme. He is a hugely charismatic figure in the classical music world. I saw him in rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. They were playing Mahler. Some orchestras, unless the conductor can lead them and command their attention, they just play. They don't particularly respond to the conductor unless he really has charisma. It was extraordinary to see him as this young man. They were totally respectful of him. He’s also such a leader in terms of being an advocate for music education. He’s a good collaborator, and he's able to be populist without ever dropping his standards. I love that.
I'm a huge fan of Irish National Opera and what they're doing. We had a Cork mezzo-soprano, Niamh O'Sullivan, as the star of a production of Werther recently. When it toured Ireland, it came to the Everyman Theatre. She was Charlotte. She stole the show. She was world class. She’s already making waves. She will be huge.
I love musicals. Growing up, I loved West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. I'm a big Sondheim fan. I love the music from West Side Story. I love the dancing. I love everything about it. It’s a modern tale of Romeo and Juliet. If it’s based in Shakespeare, it has everything as far as I'm concerned.
Enda Walsh’s theatre brings me into a different dimension, the way things are imagined. The performances in his plays are always fantastic. You're not presented with things on a plate. I don’t want to chat about his plays in the bar afterwards; I want to go off on my own and think about them. The physicality of, say, Mikel Murphy in Ballyturk blew me away. I remember seeing Ballyturk in the Cork Opera House and being so absorbed in it that I came home and ordered the play’s script on my Kindle. Then it came to The National in London a couple of weeks later. Three of our children live in London so we went to see it there. It was fantastic to see it a second time. Absolutely marvellous.
One of the first paintings I bought, which is a treasured possession, is a painting by a young Tom Climent. Tom's dad Ángel Climent worked with us in Cork’s School of Music. His father was an incredibly gifted, natural musician. As soon as I saw Tom's work, it was like the visual art equivalent of his father's music. His work is beautiful. He's abstract, but he’s gone through different phases. He’s very successful now.
Mary Swanzy is a very impressive female artist. There was an exhibition of her work at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery in 2019. I absolutely loved it. She's an Irish artist that I had never heard of before. She was so interesting herself. Her life and times were fascinating. Her work was so interesting. She was such a discovery to me. We've a long distance to go about rediscovering female artists historically.
A book I could never take off the bookshelf to give away is Noël Browne’s autobiography Against the Tide. He wrote it in 1986 after he retired. His political career was in my parents’ time. He is remembered for being the Minister for Health when he helped eradicate TB, but also it’s important to understand what he went through with the whole Mother and Child Scheme in 1951. He was such a lone political voice, but full of drive and integrity.
Fintan O'Toole’s personal history of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a brilliant read. It totally reflects my own life, and all the change that has happened in my lifetime. I feel strongly that we can be proud of the change that has happened. His writing made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Particularly instances like, say, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, or Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show interview with Annie Murphy, when the Bishop Casey scandal broke. His description of it made me remember exactly how I felt when she came in for robust questioning, the poor woman.
