The *Coming Together* Festival unfolds across five concerts in two days, tracing connections between past and present, protest and prayer, fragility and power. An All Festival Ticket gives you the complete journey—Furrer’s visionary works, Rzewski’s political minimalism, Frey’s stillness, Partch’s surreal road music, and Davóne Tines’ transformative *Mass*. It seems only yesterday, or it seems like forever, but Louth Contemporary Music Society is celebrating its twentieth birthday at midsummer next year. The programme looks back a bit. In 2006 the British pianist Joanna MacGregor kicked things off with a programme entitled ‘Blues, Spirituals and Bach’. In 2026 the final concert features the stunning American singer Davóne Tines in his interpretation of the mass, which is, as LCMS’s founder-director Éamonn Quinn puts it, ‘basically Spirituals, new tunes and, er, Bach’.
Under the banner ‘Coming Together’, the 2026 festival will have the present and the past coming together, with brand new pieces and others dating back to the 1930s, though rarely heard in Ireland.
Like every time LCMS puts on a show, it’s also about all of us coming together: people from Louth and visitors from far afield, the cognoscenti and the curious, drawn by the knowledge that whatever this outfit presents will be worth hearing, drawn also by the rare opportunity to be with other people in a simple place simply being quiet and listening.
Being with the music. Music that’s with us as we try to find our way through these wretched times. Coming together. There’s …READ MORE</>