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Event Description
You Won't Forget Me: A Celebration of Maeve Brennan in Words & Music. Pre-concert talk by Angela Bourke, author of the biography, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker.
Emilie Conway - voice
Cathy Belton - actor
Angela Bourke - author of biography. Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker,
Darragh Hennessy, piano, Damian Evans, bass, Dominic Mullan, drums
2017 marks the centenary of Maeve Brennan’s birth. A daughter of the Rising, Maeve grew up in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh, before moving to the US in 1934. In 1949 she became a staff writer for The New Yorker and wrote Talk of the Town columns as the Long-Winded Lady.
Following a sell-out event at Ranelagh Arts Centre and performances in NYC and Chicago earlier this year, the Emilie Conway Quartet is delighted to be joined again by actress Cathy Belton, and Angela Bourke to explore the soundscape of Maeve’s life and work in readings, spoken word, and music that ranges from traditional Irish to jazz, echoing how Maeve would have experienced the move from post-civil war Ireland to the glamour of cosmopolitan New York in the 1950s. Indeed Maeve’s columns for The New Yorker read like jazz: their cleverness, lightness and incisiveness show the dexterity of a master improviser which belie a deeper, Rembrandt-like meditation on the
human condition - so hauntingly audible in the ballad-like quality of her short stories and her novella.
Cathy Belton is a multi-award winning actress of theatre, TV and film whose film credits include: Philomena, A Little Chaos, Intermission, The Tiger’s Tail. Television credits include: Glenroe, The Clinic, and Red Rock for which she was nominated for an IFTA award in 2015. She performs regularly in the Abbey and Gate Theatre: The Crucible, (Abbey Theatre), A View from the Bridge, (The Gate), Medea (Abbey Theatre), A Woman of No Importance, (Gate). She also performed in Wonderful Tennessee, (Sheffield Theatre) and in the world premiere of Frank McGuinness’s one-woman play The Match Box, at the Galway Arts Festival.
Emilie Conway is an award-winning Dublin-born jazz singer. She’s been described by legendary jazz singer, Fionna Duncan as “A heart stealer with the voice of an angel, smooth, mellow, sincere and deeply connected to both music and lyrics. She is no imitator but has a fresh approach and a sound that lingers on …” Emilie released her
debut album, The Secret of a Rose, in 2012, to critical and popular acclaim and Dear World: Emilie Conway Sings Alec Wilder in 2016. She performs in Ireland and internationally.
Award-winning writer Angela Bourke is Professor Emerita in Modern Irish at UCD, Dublin, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. A frequent contributor to TV, radio, and print media, she has lectured widely and held visiting academic positions on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan. Along with the ground-breaking 2004 Brennan
biography, her books include Caoineadh na dTrí Muire (1983), By Salt Water (short stories, 1996), The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999), and the Famine Folio Voices Underfoot: Memory, Forgetting, and Oral Verbal Art (2016).
Room: John Field Room
Prices: €20 (Concessions: €17.50)
Presented by Emilie Conway
Location of event
Venue Information - The National Concert Hall
The National Concert Hall sits proudly on Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin’s city centre and is home to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Choir Ireland, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Music Network and Music Generation. Next door to the picturesque Iveagh Gardens and in the heart of a commercial district known as the National Concert Hall Quarter, it hosts over 1000 events per annum. Its mission, to foster and celebrate the appreciation, knowledge, enjoyment and pure love of music as an integral part of Irish life.