“Echoes”, the 2025 instalment of the Louth Contemporary Music Festival
It’s easy to get the feeling these days that it’s all happened before. Echoes can, of course, be comforting, suggesting that things are going as they did before. We survived that, so we can survive this. But they can also be troubling. The past was not echoing with echoes as our present seems to be. What is wrong that we go on recycling so much? And what is right?
The questions will reverberate through “Echoes”, the 2025 instalment of the Louth Contemporary Music Festival, to take place as usual at various venues in Dundalk over a weekend in early summer. Events start on the evening of Friday June 13 and continue the next day from lunchtime to nightfall. Major composers little known in Ireland hitherto will be represented, some of them visiting in person for the first time. But old friends, too, will be back, including Chamber Choir Ireland, the London group Apartment House, and one of Ireland’s foremost composers, Kevin Volans.
Two whole concerts will offer an in-depth introduction to the music of the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang, master of echoes. On opening night, at the An Táin Arts Centre, the Aleph Guitar Quartet, on amplified acoustic guitars, are joined by the astounding American singer Daisy Press in the first part of The Cold Trip, where the performers circle through repetitions and disruptions in a high state of tension. More loops and twists, sending your mind on rollercoaster, follow in Game 8-4-4, written for the Aleph players.
Next day at 1 p.m. in St. Nicholas Church of Ireland, another entry to the labyrinth of Lang is to be discovered in a work from his Monadologie series, where he bounces off music of the past. In this instance, fragments and fractures of Chopin’s Etudes follow the Lang rule of repeat, transform, move on. The Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle makes it happen.
A shift to the Chapel at St. Vincent’s at 3 p.m for more from Daisy Press and the Aleph, where the focus is on the haunting music of the Czech composer Martin Smolka, faintly oriental, faintly nowhere in this world. His Basho sets short texts by the revered poet in a sea of twinkling guitars. There will also be a brand new work.
Time, then, at 5 p.m to take you to the electric-medieval songs—more echoes—of the 1968 album The Marble Index by German singer-composer Nico and founding-member of the Velvet Underground John Cale, reinterpreted live by the musicians of Apartment House at the Spirit Store
The final concert, at 8 p.m. in St Nicholas Church of Ireland, brings on Chamber Choir Ireland in music of peace, strangeness, and hope. Kevin Volans gives unearthly harmonies to words by St John of the Cross; Sarah Davachi comes from Canada with a new meditation, and Beat Furrer’s enigmatic works add layers of intrigue and wonder. Like so much of today’s choral music, the programme echoes the prayers of long ago and asks: Can these be our prayers too?
Funded by the Arts Council and supported by The Arts Service of Louth County Council. Supported by RTÉ Supporting the Arts with the friendly support of the Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation, Louth County Council Festival Grants Initiative 2025 and the Goethe Institute.
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