It is our pleasure to welcome Sebastian Heindl to St John’s Cathedral for the final organ concert in our 2018 series. The performance will take place on Friday, 29th June at 7:30PM, and will last approximately an hour.

Sebastian won the Northern Ireland Organ Competition in 2017, and is doing a short organ recital tour of Ireland this summer, taking in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth and St Michael’s Church, Dun Laoghaire as well as Limerick.

We are fortunate and privileged that he has fitted his recital at St John’s Cathedral into his busy schedule, and with tickets priced at just 5 euro, this is great value for an enjoyable evening of fine music. The recital will feature:

Sebastián Aguilera de Heredia (1561-1627)
Obra de 8° tono – “Ensalada”

Max Reger (1873-1916)
Toccata und Fuge in a-minor (from op. 80)

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
Alleluia sereins d’un ame qui desire la ciel
Alleluia sur la trompette, Alleluia sur la Cymbal
(transcription of 2nd mvt: S. Heindl)

César Franck (1822-1890)
Choral No. 2 in b-minor 

Max Reger
Scherzo (from op. 65)

Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933)
Valse mignonne (from op. 142)
Rondo alla Campanella op. 156

Sebastian Heindl, born in 1997, received his fundamental musical education from the age of 5 as a piano student and later as a singer in St Thomas Boys’ Choir Leipzig. There he got organ lessons with University Organist Daniel Beilschmidt and had many performances as accompanist of the Choir in office of Praefectus Organus. In 2013 he contributed as an organ soloist to the BBC TV documentary “Bach: A Passionate Life” with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. He was just 15 at the time. His performance can be viewed on Youtube:

At the age of 17 he recorded his debut CD for Rondeau Production at the Great Schuke Organ at Magdeburg Cathedral including his own orchestral trancriptions. His playing on the recording was lauded by the press as “absolutely authentic, technically perfect, fiery, enthralling” (Organ_Journal für die Orgel). Sebastian performed as a soloist in many prestigious locations such as St Thomas Church Leipzig, Essen Cathedral, Altenburg Castle Chapel, Bach Church Arnstadt and the Gewandhaus Leipzig, where he gave his debut with the Poulenc organ concerto. In 2017 he won the Northern Ireland International Organ Competition giving him the opportunity to perform across the UK and in New York City in 2018. Currently he is studying church music at the University of Music in Leipzig with Prof. Martin Schmeding. He is a fellow of the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes” and the Richard Wagner Foundation.

The recital is presented by the Limerick Pipe Organ Festival, in association with St Mary’s Cathedral 850 – and we gratefully acknowledge the funding support of Limerick City and County Council/Arts Office.

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Thank you to everyone who attended Wednesday night’s concert, an evening of beautiful music and poetry. Thanks to the Sacred Heart Church, to our sponsors, and to everyone who helped to facilitate the event in any way. Thanks in particular to Eric Sweeney and Mark Roper for their wonderful performance. Pictures of the event are now available in our gallery. We’re looking forward to our final concert for 2018 next week, featuring talented German organist, Sebastian Heindl. Further details soon to follow!

Eric Sweeney performing at the Sacred Heart Church

Mark Roper reading his poetry at the Sacred Heart Church

The collaboration between Limerick Pipe Organ Festival and St Mary’s Cathedral in the 850th anniversary celebrations of the cathedral continues, with the next event taking place on Wednesday 20th June at 8 pm in The Sacred Heart Church, The Crescent, Limerick. The featured performers are Eric Sweeney, Organist and Composer, and Mark Roper, Poet. Admission is by donation at the door. All donations go towards festival costs. Thank You.   

Eric Sweeney, who celebrates his 70th birthday this year, is Organist & Choir Master at Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford, former Head of the Music Department at Waterford IT, and a prolific composer.  He began organ lessons while still a choirboy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin studying with the cathedral organist W.S. Greig. He later studied with Flor Peeters in Belgium and, with the aid of an Italian Government scholarship, with Fernando Germani in Rome. He has given recitals throughout Ireland, both North and South, as well as in England, Sweden, Italy, France, North America and Canada. His programmes reflect a special interest in contemporary music.

He has become well known also for his organ improvisations to silent movies which include The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, and Nosferatu. He collaborated with the rock group 3epkano for an improvisation to the 1930′s classic film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2011.

Since 2012 he has been collaborating with poet Mark Roper and photographer Paddy Dwan in a series of concerts featuring their work. Mark and Eric also collaborated in a series of creative writing and composing workshops for secondary schools from 2012 to 2013 that culminated in a special concert of student work as part of Waterford New Music Week in February.

Eric and Mark first worked together when they were commissioned to write a work as part of Come the Sails to celebrate the Tall Ships Race in Waterford. Their work, for massed choirs and orchestra, was performed on June 30th 2010. Mark and Eric also collaborated on an opera, The Invader.

In addition to commissions from several important organisations and festivals, Eric’s music has represented Ireland at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris on five occasions. His works have been broadcast on many European networks as well as in the USA and Canada. He will play a selection of his compositions on the night.

Award-winning poet Mark Roper will read from his latest collection Bindweed (Daedalus Press, 2017), hailed on the RTE website as “a very fine collection, surely one of the best poetry collections published this year.”  Mark Roper is an English-born poet now living near Piltown, in Co. Kilkenny. His first collection of poetry The Hen Ark (Peterloo 1990) won the 1992 Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection. He has published 6 collections since then. A Gather of Shadow (Dedalus 2012) won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014 and was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2013. The River Book: A Celebration of the Suir, a collaboration with photographer Paddy Dwan, was published, to much acclaim, in 2010. A second collaboration with Paddy Dwan, The Backstrand: Tramore’s Open Secret, was published in 2013. The pair are currently at work on a book about the Comeragh Mountains.

Mark is also an experienced Creative Writing teacher, and has run courses and workshops in many different settings, including schools, prisons, and senior citizen centres. From September 2002 to May 2003 he was writer-in-residence at Waterford Regional Hospital.

Organ and Poetry is a new venture for Limerick Pipe Organ Festival and as such we are really looking forward to the experience.  We hope you can join us to hear these two masters of their arts treat us to a selection of their best work.

Many thanks to everyone involved in making the Three Choirs Concert such a wonderful success! Thank you in particular to everyone who attended, to St. Mary’s Cathedral, and to the three choirs who provided such beautiful music: St. Canice’s Cathedral Choir, Kilkenny, Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Waterford, and our own St. Mary’s choir. Photos of the event will soon be posted in our gallery.

 

As part of the year-long 850th anniversary celebrations at St Mary’s Cathedral, we are delighted to be welcoming cathedral choirs from Waterford and Kilkenny for a special Three Choirs Concert on Saturday 19th May at 5pm. The main work in the programme is Mozart’s popular Coronation Mass. Mozart’s charming mass setting is full of good tunes and lively choral writing, and is an ideal piece for the combined choirs to be singing for this commemorative occasion.  The other main piece to be sung by the assembled forces is Handel’s rousing anthem Zadok the Priest.  The choirs – St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford and our own St Mary’s choir will each be singing a set of pieces on their own, so the programme will be nicely varied. It presents a rare opportunity to hear this kind of musical selection performed live right on our doorstep. Three cathedral choirs for the price of one if you like!

Tickets priced €10, with €8 concessions, are available from the cathedral website, www.saintmaryscathedral.ie, by phoning St Mary’s on 061 310293, or at the door. Please also see the website for more information on this concert and on the many other events throughout the year that have been organised in order to celebrate this significant anniversary of the foundation of St Mary’s Cathedral in 1168.

We hope to see you there!