The RCC looks forward to hosting the West Ocean String Quartet featuring Lynda O’Connor!
Lynda O’Connor is known one of the greatest Irish violinists of her generation with an international career as soloist, chamber musician and orchestral leader. Lynda is filling in for Seamus McGuire who is recovering from a shoulder injury. The whole RCC team wishes Seamus a speedy recovery!
In November 1999, The West Ocean String Quartet set sail on what has become an endlessly fascinating journey of experimentation and collaboration, of seeking out other ways, of finding our own voice. Along the way, they have shared stages and studios with some of the very finest – Christy Moore, Liam O’Flynn, Stephen Rea, Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill, Matt Molloy, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Brian Kennedy and Eimear Quinn. Core to the journey has been the weaving of the quartet’s own tapestry, striving for ways to communicate through composing and arranging and producing what they believe in. A quadruple marriage over more than two decades is no dull jaunt.
For Atlantic Edge, the quartet’s fifth album, rather than the emphasis being predominantly on newly-composed music, they have embraced traditional music from or about the west of Ireland. The seemingly endless store of inexplicably beautiful airs and robust dance music from along the Atlantic edge underlines how landscape shapes humans, and vice versa. The two become inextricable, interdependent, and when artists seek to express themselves it’s inevitable that something of that sense of place appears. Airs and tunes of love and exile and home and longing and heartbreak.
“A musical odyssey to soothe and stimulate the imagination”. Siobhan Long, Irish Times
