View from the Green Room: SETU remembers Deirdre Scanlon
SETU Music School presents SETU Orchestra and Concert Strings.
It’s best bib and tucker for tonight’s SETU Orchestras and guests for an orchestral concert dedicated to the memory of Deirdre Scanlon who played a massive role in Waterford music as a performer and teacher and who sadly passed away this Christmas. Over the course of the evening, tributes are paid to Deirdre’s memory.
Dr. Caroline McGarry, Assistant Head of the South East Technological University Music School, remembered, along with Musical Director Stephen Mackey, Deirdre as an inspirational teacher and organiser in the SETU Music School, which Deirdre’s father – composer, performer and teacher, the late Fintan O’Carroll – played a key role in establishing.
I spoke on behalf of the arts community in Waterford of Deirdre’s musical legacy in establishing two orchestras – Budding Bows for younger players and Concert Strings for the older players –and of the incredible role she played in keeping those orchestras established for more than a generation.
Deirdre’s Concert Strings Orchestra, under the baton of Eimear Heaney with leader Amber Shamshad, gets tonight’s concert up and running with ‘The Pacific Main Theme’ from the hit TV series ‘The Pacific’ written by Hans Zimmer.
Their second piece is The Final Countdown, a song written by the Swedish rock band ‘Europe’ with lyrics inspired by David Bowie's ‘Space Oddity’, released – would you believe it – way back in 1986. It was originally only intended to be a concert opener until Nick Morris’s music video, made to promote the single, turned out to be a massive success. To date, it has received over 1.3 billion views on YouTube and regularly featured in finales of Tops of the Town shows.
The SETU Jazz Ensemble is a big hit tonight with the moody-broody Duke Ellington classic ‘In a Sentimental Mood’, which Duke composed on the spot at a party one night in North Carolina.
The SETU Waterford Orchestra is the Institute’s most senior orchestra and the orchestra’s conductors are Stephen Mackey and Andrew Sheeran. Tonight they’re opening with Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite No 1. It's a concert suite derived from Bizet's incidental music for his friend Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne – The Lady from Arles — originally performed in 1872. The play was originally a flop and Daudet hoped in vain that Bizet’s music would somehow revive it.
However, while Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suites Nos 1 & 2 proved very popular with audiences and still does, the music couldn’t revive the play.
Gustav Mahler was celebrated during his lifetime as one of the greatest opera conductors – especially in the stage works of Wagner, Mozart and Tchaikovsky. Because he earned his living as a conductor, compositions were limited to his summer holidays. Nevertheless, he still found time to complete nine massive symphonies.
Mahler’s Urlicht (Primeval night) is the most famous piece of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, and is sung tonight by mezzo-soprano Bridget Knowles. Bridget really captures its intimate, prayer-like atmosphere that brings hope and acceptance.
The Anthem from Chess is the most powerful part of its score. Chess is a big, sprawling story involving a politically-driven, Cold War chess tournament between an American grandmaster and his Soviet grandmaster opponent and their fight over a woman who manages one and falls in love with the other.
The entire plotline is a metaphor for the Cold War of the early eighties where individuals become manipulated pawns in a greater political game understood by only a handful of people and where nobody’s on nobody’s side. If it sounds complicated, it’s because it is complicated!
However, there’s no denying the power and the emotion of the Anthem. Tenor Calum McGavock, with the combined SETU Orchestras, sends us out into the night on a night of reflection and emotion.
