The National Concert Hall (NCH) is an imposing and beautiful building, and over the last number of years they have broadened their programming out in order to encourage audiences who wouldn’t have previously considered the Earlsfort Terrace venue as a place to get your live music fix.
With residencies from trad-music super-group The Gloaming in March and more recently by Laurie Anderson in May, as well as bookings like R&B singer Macy Gray and nu-jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, the 1,200-seater main room has hosted plenty of musical highlights in the first half of 2017.
Here RTÉ Culture brings you recommendations from the rest of the programme, hopefully they convince you to pay a visit to your National Concert Hall.
Francesco Tristano, Piano 2.0 – July 27th (€20)
Much of NCH’s Perspectives Series is an exploration of the increasingly porous borders between electronic and classical music, that space which has meshed to create the modern-classical genre, or the DJ-composer.
Francesco Tristano’s Piano 2.0 is a perfect example of an artist who eschews clear - and often snobbish - definitions of what a particular genre should be.
With that familiar Nils Frahm-esque setup - whereby the musician is surrounded by pianos, keyboards, synths and laptops and the performance is about playing, looping and mixing the music live in front of audiences - this will be the first time Tristano has brought his show to Dublin.
Donny McCaslin Group – October 23rd & 24th (€20)
Saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his backing group were the last band to record with David Bowie; they played on his Blackstar album.
The band have since created an album dedicated to Bowie, called Beyond Now. The record is a tribute to the extraordinary time they spent in the studio with one of music’s all-time greats.
"It was like a dream except it was something I never could have dreamed of," says McCaslin. "David Bowie was a visionary artist whose generosity, creative spirit, and fearlessness will stay with me the rest of my days. Beyond Now is dedicated to him and all who loved him."
They band will play two intimate shows in the NCH this October.
Nils Frahm – February 26th 2018 (€30)
The pioneering nu-classical musician and composer, Nils Frahm, has announced details of a worldwide series of concerts in 2018. Dubbed the All Melody tour, he brings his new show to Dublin on February 27th before moving onto Belfast’s Mandela Hall the following night.
2015 was the last time Nils Frahm brought his layered and sublime brand of live classical music to the NCH. That same year he set up Piano Day, an annual international celebration of the instrument, which is marked on the 88th day of the year because the piano has that number of keys. In 2017, it fell on March 29th.
Having spent the year in hibernation in his Funkhaus studio in Berlin, Frahm is ready to present his new music to the world; these concerts will be among the musical highlights of 2018.
View all upcoming concerts at the National Concert Hall here.
