The 2024 Festival will take place from 27 to 29 September - details of the programme will be posted soon. In the meantime, we leave you with a souvenir of the marvellous 2023 edition…

 

As always, the 2023 Festival offered a rich variety of concerts, with top performers from Ireland and abroad, and for the first time we presented a fully staged Baroque opera, Handel’s  beloved pastoral comedy Acis and Galatea, set in a puppet theatre with the singers and players of Collegium Marianum from Prague, and the Buchty a Loutky marionnette theatre company.

The Festival also featured

 ·       Mezzo-soprano Sharon Carty (star of INO’s recent Cosi Fan Tutte) with an enchanting selection of operatic arias in Handel’s witches, bitches and britches

 ·       Westland Baroque, an ensemble of young graduates of the RIAM, in a recital of French music, as well as taking Baroque music to schools around Sligo

 ·       Two concerts by members of Collegium Marianum: Soiree at Versailles - pieces for flute, theorbo and viola da gamba, and Meditations – sacred motets by French composers of the seventeenth century.

 ·       Sligo Baroque Orchestra performing concerti grossi by Corelli, Heinichen, Fasch and others

 ·       A proms concert by Sligo Academy of Music students and a choral concert by Sligo Youth Voices

 And in the run-up to the Festival, we joined with the Hawk’s Well Theatre on Culture Night, Friday 22 September, to present Sligo Baroque Orchestra and a host of traditional Irish musicians in a new rendition of the Tradroque concert which was such a hit in 2018.

I’ve played in many festivals, some of which have been musically fabulous, and others which have had an amazing sense of community and conviviality, but I’ve honestly never experienced one which had such an abundance of both.”

— Thelma Handy, violinist with London Handel Players,

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