Festival Artistic Director
Gwendolyn Masin

Welcome Note

Music is a powerful form of communication. It appeals to a dimension of human consciousness that no other language can penetrate. The musicians that I have invited to perform at this year's Carrick Water Music Festival show just how powerful the language of music is, transcending culture, age, race and gender.
Every group or soloist that will take to the stage in Carrick has either borrowed influences from a country beyond their own place of birth or has integrated their cultural background into the tapestry that is the Emerald Isle today. For nine days, Carrick will be the platform for a celebration of musical and cultural exchange within Ireland.

Artistically guiding the festival for the second time has been an honour for me and it is my pleasure to present the inspiring collection of musical genres that this year's festival includes.

Gwendolyn Masin
Artistic Director

 

Gwendolyn Masin Profile

Gwendolyn Masin has been described as "a natural performer with an authority most violinists would envy" (Irish Times), "an exciting and formidable talent" (Sunday Business Post), and "an impressive soloist with a beautifully rich tone, easy virtuosity and a real feeling for a musical line" (Sunday Tribune).

Gwendolyn is the descendant of a long line of professional musicians from Central and Eastern Europe. Born in Amsterdam, she began her musical education at the age of three when, inspired by her Hungarian grandmother, she began to play the piano. She took up the violin at the age of five and within her first year of schooling, gave her début performance in the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest.

Aged eleven she was introduced to the Irish public when she played a recital in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, and later that year appeared on The Late Late Show. She has won prestigious prizes and awards in South Africa, the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands and Switzerland and has gained degrees with highest honours from the Royal Schools of Music in London, the Hochschule der Künste in Berne and the Musikhochschule in Lübeck.

Gwendolyn performs extensively in Europe and South Africa and has played as a soloist with orchestras such as the Saint Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, the Bernese Symphony Orchestra and the Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra (Moscow), and regularly performs with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and RTÉ Concert Orchestra of Ireland. Festival appearances include the West Cork Chamber Music Festival (Ireland), Prussia Cove (UK), Internationaal Kamermuziekfestival Schiermonnikoog (The Netherlands) and Festival Internazionale della Musica Linari (Italy).

She has recorded for Tonus-Music Records and was the featured artist on the soundtrack to the Swiss film Localisation.
Devoted to the performance of contemporary music, Gwendolyn Masin has premiered various works from, amongst others, Don Li, Urs Peter Schneider, Eric Sweeney and John Buckley, the latter of whom is currently completing his first violin concerto, dedicated to her.

Chamber music collaborations have seen Gwendolyn perform with pianists Julia Bartha, Finghin Collins, Robert Kulek and Aleksandar Madzar, violists Isabel Charisius and Roger Chase and cellists Alexander Baillie, Martti Rousi and Alexander Rudin.

In recent years, Gwendolyn has contributed to new ventures that make music accessible to a wider audience. She established the international, multidisciplinary series In Search of Lost Time in 2004, and in 2006, the annual Gaia Chamber Music Festival, which has taken place in the region of Stuttgart for two consecutive years, and will take place in Switzerland in 2009. In 2007, as Carrick Water Music Festival's newly appointed artistic director, she received acclaim as "an innovative and daring operator within the musical-cultural sphere" from the Sunday Business Post.

A pedagogue since her teenage years, Gwendolyn's book on violin teaching, entitled Michaela's Music House, will be published Europe-wide in 2009.