Francesco Walks (by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin)

Описание: 'Francesco Walks' composed by Mícheál Ó Súilleabhain (1950 - 2018) for fiddle quartet, uilleann pipes, harpsichord and string orchestra. This live performance from the concert 'Lumen: A Celebration of the Light', performed at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, featured the Liz Doherty Fiddle Quartet (with Aidan O'Donnell, Katie Boyle and Zoë Conway), piper Mark Redmond, and the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Brophy from the harpsichord, took place on 2 September 2022.
‘Francesco Walks’ features a theme borrowed from Francesco Geminiani’s (1680-1762) ‘Concerto Grosso La Follia’.
According to Ó Súilleabháin:
‘Francesco Walks’ is a title I give to the idea of Francesco Geminiani, who resided […] in Dublin […] going on a walking tour of Ireland. In the original imagining, he heads for Buncrana, in Inishowen, on the Donegal peninsula, […] and he meets up with his band for a performance. On route, as one would imagine, he meets traditional fiddlers, so he teaches them the well-known tune, ‘La Follia’, upon, which, he has composed (which he did) a Concerto Grosso of the same name. Like a pied piper, in this imagining, he brings the fiddlers with him, and a concert ensues where the baroque band and the local fiddlers take on the ‘La Follia’ concerto each from their own musical perspective. Geminiani’s dates overlap with those of the blind and nomadic harper Carolan, and it’s not all unlikely that Geminiani would, in fact, have met Carolan, as well as hearing, of course, country fiddlers playing the newly emerging dance music that we now know as Irish traditional music. ‘Francesco Walks’, allows us to travel back in time to imagine a story of such a cultural intersection, and its performance in our own time allows us to bring Geminiani forward to play with the very fiddlers […] who have a direct line of sonic succession with the fiddlers that Geminiani may have heard.