IRISH WINGS
Seamus Heaney and Greece
Sonnets from Hellas and Other Poems
read by Catherine Heaney
with music by Hellas Ensemble and Elias Dendias
Tuesday 11 July 9pm Loggos School Yard, Paxos, Greece
The Greek island of Paxos is many people’s idea of heaven on earth. Peaceful, relatively untouched by modern development and accessible only by a ferry from the neighbouring island of Corfu, it is a tiny jewel set in the blue Ionian Sea
It is here that Kathryn Baird, a former BBC Northern Ireland producer, classicist and Greek scholar, spends half of each year and where she has established Irish Wings, a thriving little annual festival whose events tie together her two much-loved home places.
Every summer a different group of Irish artists converges on Paxos for Irish Wings, which this year will feature the poetry of Seamus Heaney, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of his death. Music will be by the Hellas Ensemble, an impressive line-up of musicians from Ireland, Greece and America, who will present a newly-composed suite of music in celebration of Heaney’s work.
Irish Wings is based in the picturesque one-room school house of the portside village of Loggos. The evening of events takes place in the charming courtyard behind the peach-coloured building and are regarded as an important part of the annual Paxos Music Festival.
With support from Culture Ireland, the Embassy of Ireland in Greece and the Friends of Paxos, Irish Wings is now a recognised highlight of the Paxos summer festival. As Baird explains, its mission is to explore and nurture connections between Greek and Irish artists of all disciplines, who, as well as entering into a dialogue with their Greek counterparts, get to experience the Venetian olive groves, clear waters, sea caves and white chalk cliffs of this exquisite island.
“Irish Wings started in 2017 out of my love of Irish traditional music and interest in the culture of Greece, especially rembetika, the Greek blues”, she says.
“Central to rembetika is the bouzouki, a long-necked lute with a round body and a flat top, which was brought into Ireland in the 1960s by the singer Johnny Moynihan and developed into the instrument now known worldwide as the Irish bouzouki. It features prominently in the post-traditional music of many Irish players, including, of course, Planxty members Andy Irvine and Dónal Lunny, who travelled to Paxos for the first Irish Wings.
“This year we are honoured to have Catherine Heaney read Sonnets from Hellas by her late father, the Nobel Literature laureate Seamus Heaney. Her readings will be accompanied by music inspired by these poems and composed and played by Irish and Greek musicians.
“Catherine will remember her father’s love of Greece and will read his translation of a poem by the great Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. Sonnets from Hellas comprise six brief but vivid glimpses into the Greek landscape that so inspired Heaney. We are honoured to include in the reading a new translation of one of the sonnets by the eminent poet and translator Dionysis Kapsalis”.
The Hellas Ensemble’s Celtic-Greek musical suite reflects the group’s deep admiration for Heaney’s work. It has been composed by three bouzouki players: Marty Coyle from Derry in Ireland, Nikos Petsakos from Ikaria and Chicago, and Paxiot bouzouki virtuoso Elias Dendias. Dendias, who until recently was unknown beyond his native island, returned home at the start of the year after an Australian tour with his group Maistrato, in support of the rock band Crowded House.
The ‘mysterious Grecian acoustic four-piece’ band (as dubbed by mainstream music press) opened the Crowded House concerts on their 2022 national tour and acquired its name shortly before leaving Greece for the tour.
“The name Maistrato came up for the sake of this collaboration with Crowded House”, explains Dendias. “It’s a place on Paxi island, where I come from, where we jammed with them for the first time”.
As Crowded House frontman Neil Finn explains, the musicians met on Paxos and immediately struck up a creative simpatico:
“The four good men of Maistrato. We befriended them in a small fishing village and played music together till dawn. Everything from rebetiko (the Greek blues) and laiko to Led Zeppelin to Radiohead. Joyous, bittersweet songs through the ages.”
The Hellas Ensemble will perform on a range of instruments, including the Irish pipes and the Irish harp, neither of which has been played on Paxos before.
Over the past six years, internationally renowned Irish artists like Paul Muldoon, Martin Hayes, Horslips, Theo Dorgan, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, Gerry O’Beirne, Anne Haverty and Mick O’Dea have come to the island. All of them speak warmly of this rare opportunity to showcase the best of Irish culture in shared spaces and to explore the ways in which artists can work across disciplines to transcend geographical and political borders and ethnicities. Audiences and artists revel in the festival’s intimate atmosphere, where performers and spectators can mingle, converse and engage in a rich dialogue between Greek and Irish culture.
The cherry on the cake of this year’s festival will be an exhibition by six Irish ceramicists. It has been organised by Chris Boïcos, whose family comes from Paxos and who has a summer art gallery in Gaios, the capital of the island. A collection of beautifully contrasting pieces will be exhibited in the Loggos school house, in a creative exchange with seven Greek ceramicists.
“The graphic image of Irish Wings is a blackbird, which, in the medieval Irish poem, sings over Belfast Lough”, says Baird.
“Here on Paxos, it soars over the Ionian Sea, above an island, which, in summer fills with international residents and tourists of many nationalities. In these fractured times, it is an ideal place to explore what brings us all together, rather than what drives and keeps us apart. And to wonder how the bird will land and who will hear it”.
Further information:
Kathryn Baird kathryn.baird2@gmail.com
Faye Lychnou fayepaxosfestival@gmail.com
Paxos Music Festival https://paxosfestival.com/
The Even Hand 