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Music in Grand Irish Houses
By MARY D. KIERSTEAD
Mount Stewart Birr Castle Carton Castletown The Music
very June for the last 26 years, there has been a festival of music in great Irish houses, and although the concerts are open to the public, getting the word out has not been a top priority. We found out about it quite by accident -- eavesdropping in a restaurant. My husband, Wil, and I go to Ireland every couple of years, and the combination of music, architecture and gardens struck us as an opportunity to indulge our interest in all three. Aside from these attractions, there is the Irish countryside. Getting from A to B (never as the crow flies and occasionally stopped dead by a cattle fair in the middle of the village) is half the fun. The festival takes place over a period of two weeks, and consists of a series of concerts in grand houses and historic buildings. The venues vary from year to year -- a couple of the concerts are always in Dublin, the rest scattered about the country.
We started proceedings in March with a phone call to the Irish Tourist Board, which produced a list of the concerts and venues "subject to amendment." There were 11 in all, 3 of them repeats (both musicians and programs), and 3 in places that we'd already seen. To coordinate concerts we might attend with places where we might stay we studied a map and an invaluable brochure called "The Hidden Ireland," which lists some 40 private country houses of character, comfort and good food that take paying guests.
The festival is nonprofit. Funds come from ticket sales and corporate sponsors, and the festival administration is largely volunteer. The road from a request for information to possession of tickets is bumpy, but a month after our call, we received a pamphlet with the programs and venues, as well as information about the musicians. We decided to try for Mount Stewart, Birr Castle, Carton, Castletown and the American Ambassador's residence in Dublin. Many faxes and phone calls later, we ended up with tickets to four of the five concerts we hoped to attend. (Naturally, the size of the audience is determined by the space available in each place, but usually there are around 150 people. We were unable to get tickets for the concert at the American Ambassador's residence in Phoenix Park, Dublin, because of the large number who seized the chance to get a look at Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith's current home.)
The concerts begin at 8 P.M., and last about two hours. The quality of the performances we heard was high, the music untaxing, the audience attentive. Wine is served before the concert and during the intermission, and if you arrive early, with or without a picnic supper, you can wander around the gardens, tour the principal rooms on the ground floor, or just schmooze with other members of the audience, a social grace that the Irish have raised to a fine art. The audience is predominantly Irish, plus a few music aficionados from foreign shores. A hard core of concertgoers showed up regularly and we began to think of them as newfound friends. We set up a base camp in Dublin, and made forays into the countryside, spending the night on the two longer drives at one of the country houses we'd chosen.
Mount Stewart
he first concert was at Mount Stewart, on the Ards peninsula in County Down, Northern Ireland, and, allowing time for wrong turns, a good three hours from Dublin. There are no longer any checkpoints at the border, and we had a beautiful drive along the eastern coast and the Mourne mountains, arriving in the afternoon at Tyrella, a classical Georgian house where we had booked a room for the night. The owners (horsy people, judging by the loving cups and photographs) were away, and we were shown to our luxurious room by the housekeeper pro tem, who later gave us a more-than-satisfactory early supper (potato and leek soup, chicken salad, cheese, fruit) in the handsome dining room. There were four other guests, invisible at that hour, who showed up the next morning for the substantial Irish breakfast.
We reached Mount Stewart with time to walk around a fraction of the garden and parkland -- 98 acres in all. The house is an important 18th-century structure, with renowned 20th-century gardens overlooking Strangford Lough, open in the afternoon to the public at specified times from April through October. It's the home of the Londonderry family, who were major players in British social and political life, particularly Robert Viscount Castlereagh -- he became Foreign Secretary in 1812 -- and the house is filled with such memorabilia as the 22 Empire chairs he brought back from the Congress of Vienna. (The program notes offered the doleful information that Lord Castlereagh committed suicide in 1822 by cutting his throat with a penknife.) The gardens were created by the seventh marchioness in the 1920's, and in addition to the formal areas, there are walks, woods, a lake and a notable collection of trees and shrubs from all over the world.
The concert, by a two-piano team, Una Hunt and Stephanie Hughes (both Irish), was held in the Stone Hall, Mount Stewart's splendid entry hall, an octagon with a black-and-white checkered floor, Ionic pillars, 11-foot paneled mahogany doors, statuary and a huge Stubbs of a racehorse hanging in the half landing above the hall. Folding chairs had been set up in rows, a few reserved for V.I.P.'s, the rest up for grabs.
Celebrating the 80th birthday of the Irish composer and pianist Joan Trimble, who was present, the Misses Hunt and Hughes played a program of Handel, Mozart, Trimble, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and as Miss Trimble remarked afterward, "It was quite, quite lovely," a comment that could be applied to all the concerts we heard. Daylight lasts until 10 or 10:30 at this time of year, and we drove back in the silvery twilight along the shores of the lough to our lodging.
Birr Castle
irr Castle, where our next concert took place, is in County Offaly, about a two-hour drive west from Dublin. The seat of the Earls of Rosse, it was given to the British Parsons family, later elevated to an earldom, in 1620. (How the former owners, the Ely O'Carrolls, felt about this is not mentioned.) The gardens, on 150 acres, are a dendrologist's delight because of the rarity and breadth of the great number of species, and include a park, an arboretum, a lake and the remains of a gigantic telescope (until 1917 the largest reflecting telescope in the world), the apple of the third Earl's eye. The castle is largely Gothic Revival, the original having been badly damaged by fire in 1823, and is not open to the public.
The seventh Earl and his family actually live in it, which makes a noticeable difference in the feel of a place. We were in a home rather than a museum, and were struck by the comfort as well as the elegance of the rooms. The present Earl and Countess attended, mixing amiably with the audience, creating a buzz of excitement among the wine-drinkers.
The Earl seemed preoccupied with an 18th-century Irish harp, which he'd had restrung and put in a place of honor at the end of the music room, but the rest of us were too busy inspecting the beautiful reception rooms to give the harp its due. The concert, held in the large dining room, which had been cleared for the ubiquitous folding chairs, was given by the Parisii String Quartet, a group of merry Frenchmen who played Haydn, Beethoven and Debussy. (The German Ambassador to Ireland reserved comment on the Haydn and Beethoven, but allowed that the Debussy was stunning.) Afterward, the musicians hung out with the audience, fractured French and English flying.
We spent the night at Tullanisk, another Hidden-Ireland country house, once the 18th-century dower house for Birr Castle, now occupied by a Mr. and Mrs. Gossip, and just down the road from the castle gardens, where we walked the next morning. The house is Georgian with neo-Gothic overtones (or maybe vice versa). Our charming room was filled with idiosyncratic furnishings and books, as was the rest of the house. Breakfast was whatever you wanted, and we wanted the works: fruit, porridge, eggs, bacon, fried tomatoes, toast and all the jam options. (The Gossips are noted for their cuisine in general, not just big breakfasts.)
Carton
ur last two concerts were at Carton and Castletown, two magnificent Palladian houses in County Kildare, about an hour from Dublin. At one time they were occupied by sisters: Carton by the Countess of Kildare, Castletown by Lady Louisa Connolly.
Carton is an unspoiled 18th-century demesne, recently bought by a businessman from Northern Ireland, and currently undergoing major repairs. The house stands on 500 acres of farm and parkland, and was encased in scaffolding, which detracted from its beauty but did not conceal its lines. The garden -- parkland, trees and shrubs -- is for strolling; there are no herbaceous borders. The concert was held in the very grand salon. A British consort of viols, called Fretwork, and a soprano, Catherine Bott, presented a program of English consort music from the 16th and 17th centuries, entitled "This merry pleasant spring." The Irish Times rightly gave it a good review ("Last night's concert was uplifting."): the consort was skilled, and the soprano had a lovely voice and great presence. But this music is special, and no matter how handsome the room, lines like "My mistress had a little dog/Whose name was Pretty Royal" set my husband's toes to tapping toward the nearest exit.
He did not return after the intermission. Instead, he studied the print room, papered by Lady Kildare with a collage of prints and decorative borders (a fashionable occupation for ladies at the time), inspected the kitchen, which he fantasized duplicating in our own house, counted the number of trees in a sort of giant pincushion of yews in front of the house (12), and then sat with another defector in the hall, drinking wine and chatting. The value of a fallback position should not be underestimated.
astletown, Ireland's largest and finest Palladian
house, now in the care of the Office of Public Works, was built for William
Connolly, speaker of the Irish House of Parliament, a poor boy who
by the 1720's was acknowledged the richest man in Ireland. He died
before it was finished, but a grandnephew inherited it, married Lady Louisa
Lennox (age 15), who had been brought up at Carton by her older sister,
and work resumed.