Glyndebourne in East Cork with knobs on
Ballymaloe, "The Grain Store", the evening of Sunday November 2008 - a historic inauguration of a new concert venue. An evening to savour, remember and plan to re-create.
[This is a long piece, so I’m going to break up the text with photographs without worrying about whether the photographs are in the most appropriate place. ]
I was invited by my friend, the sculptor, Lionel Powell (whose work you can see here). He said it was to be an evening of classical and traditional music, and that Micheal O’Suilleabhain would be playing.
There would be mulled wine before and nibbles after. I was excited at the prospect of live music, and cautious about my ability to find Ballymaloe in the dark.
But what an evening! What a place! It’ll live in my memory for as long as that fragile instrument continues to perform well.
I better be succinct because I could easily go on at length about the hall which reminded me of the old Glyndebourne - its rectangular shape and almost churchlike atmosphere. It also reminded me of Longborough - built by a farmer from an outhouse (a vernacular building), splendidly warm acoustics and an extraordinary transformation of use from the animal agricultural to the cultural spiritual.
I could wax on the fine music chosen by Sara Bryans (piano)
with Barbara Gisler-Haase (flute)
& Eva Landkammer (cello)
which set us off with Haydn, just to make us comfortable - and then took us into Martinu [Poco Allegretto, Adagio & Allegretto Scherzando] and on to a composer I never heard of: A.F.Doppler ["Souvenir du Regi"]. This was a brilliant journey and I wrote this nonsense:
Sara, Eva, Barbara
A trio
on Martinu
High din
Souvenir du Regi
After Scherzando
Melody for three
Friends
Jubalation… oration in a barn
Rory far Ming vase waltzing
in to an interval
in my life among the rafters
Exquisite rapture
woken.
Rory Allen’s the farmer who made it happen…
who brought it all together. I met the man who put on the roof, did the brickwork and windows. I met people called Adair and thought of my mother in Adare. I also met Andrea Jameson who has a painting studio in Capaquin. I saw men and women in hacking jackets and felt the warm buzz all round the walls of soft limewash.
While the trio were leading us on a flight of imagination, I drew my journey in my notebook. So now I have an image of my imagination.
There was a break but no toilet in the hall, thereby giving people an excuse to nip over to Ballymaloe House. I met two women, one from Georgia, the other Los Angeles. It was great to hear a southern accent and to meet someone who knew about the Civil War, for whom it meant something when I said I’d been singing "Marching through Georgia" as I negotiated the country lanes to the big house.
O’Suilleabhain came on. He needed no introduction. I must have been the only person there who’d never seen him before. He’s a giant in the field I know. He’s a giant on the keyboard I experienced. I thought of Keith Jarrett. I let myself be roused to the march of a sterling player. He introduced his work with short paragraphs that whetted the appetite, that primed the ears.
I wrote in my intimate journal:
"The beauty of being able to say what’s on your mind about culture and all the tangents to that. To stand up and entrust your body with the job of being a way through for the unconscious transformations of thought.
Out come the words, the pictures, the stimuli to tickle the audience and bring life into the minds, bring the minds alive through setting off little bangers in the brains.
Oh the joy of being me, loosening the restraints so that I flow out and on, swirl and twirl to the music within the soul
becoming a soul path, a boreen for the mind to play on…"
I can’t go on describing the proceedings. There were the sons of Micheal, Rory Allen himself with his guitar, and the glorious voice of Orla McCarthy. If she has artistic purpose and stamina (she has more than enough talent) she’ll become a star, and it was lovely to meet her parents who sat in the same row as me. Frankie Lane, guitarist-singer, entertainer, performed "Ghost Riders in the Sky", and I wrote in bold capitals
GRAINSTORE WHAT A NIGHT!!
The drawback was that the evening was so packed with goodies that I had to be careful to stay calm. I failed. I went round meeting people - just like the hypomaniac I suspect I am.
Today’s to be a calming day, a recovering day. I’m to lay aside all those thoughts I had about this being the perfect venue for project one & project two - how I’d like to rush out and start filling the space with minds booked for journeys.
The food, nibbles after, was pea soup with bread and tomato sauce. But what a pea soup - a Cully&Sully soup. And bread I had to scoff as if I hadn’t eaten for days.
Suffice to say
CONGRATULATIONS RORY YOU HAVE MUCH TO BE PROUD OF. YOU HAVE DONE A LEGACY MATTER. IT’LL LIVE AFTER YOU. I THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
ps : If you’d like to see the whole set of photographs I took there, please let me know
