With the kind support of Farmleigh House and The OPW - Office of Public Works, Kirkos Ensemble are proud to present Attrition ж A Musical Tribute to a Lost Generation. Set between Farmleigh’s breathtaking ballroom and conservatory on Saturday September 21st, the afternoon will present a new version of composer Sebastian Adams' Harry Patch alongside Cross, a new installation piece from composer Robert Coleman. The audience will be transported into a chaotic, dark yet captivating world designed to play with the listener’s perspective of time.

Taking Messiaen’s famous Quartet for the end of time as its model, and named after the longest surviving British combattant of the first World War, Harry Patch is a concert-length piece for horn, flute, cello and piano in 8 movements, originally written to be played in total darkness. While “angels and paradise exist” in Messiaen’s piece, such hope is absent in Adams’ musical tribute as it becomes a secular meditation on the futility of war and exists in a world where no one is listening.
Adams on his work, ‘…I disagree with Messaien: there’s a real message of hope in his music, but Harry Patch is saying that we’re a century later and nothing has changed.’

Bringing the theme of war into an Irish context, Robert Coleman’s Cross is an audiovisual work taking inspiration from a leading figure of the Irish rebellion, Thomas Ashe. The soundscape created in Cross features words and melodies from ‘Let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord’, a song that Ashe wrote in 1916 while imprisoned in Brighton for his participation in the Easter Rising.

While Ashe was a militant, Patch became known for his famous line “war is not worth one life”, and as one man served in the war in France in 1917, the other passed away following a hunger strike and being violently force fed by the British authorities.

Both founding members and directors of Kirkos Ensemble, Sebastian and Robert aim to bring audiences emotional, profound and fun experiences. Going way beyond a typical classical music concert, the audience can expect a Saturday afternoon in beautiful surroundings, with a meditation on the ugliness of war, and moments of wildness, quiet, tranquility, aggression, silence and passion.

The members of Kirkos Ensemble performing the works will be Yseult Cooper Stockdale, Miriam Kaczor, Hannah Miller, Alexander Bernstein [Harry Patch], and Tom Roseingrave [Cross].

Saturday September 21st ж Farmleigh House
Doors 2.30pm ж Performance 3.00pm
Tickets €15 [regular] ж 4 for €50 [family]

Artwork by the brilliant Éna Brennan

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