John Corigliano, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, October 20, 2009
WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO’S opera The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade. The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of [...]

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Never Ask Me Why: Paul Auster, Novelist

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, September 5, 2009
WELL, MR AUSTER. Tell me all about yourself.” Quite a way to start a conversation. But then, if you’re Samuel Beckett, you can probably get away with any conversation-starter you like. And it goes without saying that you can lean across the table to pilfer a cigarette [...]

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An Irishman in America: Colm Tóibín

 
First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, April 25, 2009

IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his [...]

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An Interview with Philip Schultz, Poet

 
First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009
‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”
Schultz, now 64, [...]

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Lived-in Lots: Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts

 
First Published in the Irish Times, Saturday, April 11, 2009
THERE’S A HENRY JAMES story which set Leanne Shapton’s heart thumping even before she’d read it, and when you look at the title – The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – it’s not hard to see why. James’s earliest ghost story was published in 1868, and when Shapton [...]

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Beyond the soundtrack of the boom: Composer Bill Whelan

First Published: The Irish Times, March 14th, 2009
DEPRESSION HAS TO be outside of our options at the moment,” says Bill Whelan. He’s talking about Ireland. He’s talking about the end of that era in Irish history to which some believe Whelan himself, with Riverdance in 1994, wrote the official soundtrack: the Celtic Tiger. Which is [...]

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Unearthing Skeletons: Dirk Wittenborn

 
First Published in the Irish Times, Saturday, February 28, 2009
EVERY FAMILY HAS its secrets, says Dirk Wittenborn. Every family, he says, “has its bogeyman”. So, in a way, the Wittenborns of New Haven weren’t really that unusual. Not really. But even Wittenborn himself doesn’t look convinced by that idea. He may just have written a [...]

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Obama and the Arts: Hoping for a New Dawn

First Published: The Irish Times, January 22, 2009
AS PRESIDENTIAL portraits go, it’s a change – no surprise there. But the portrait of the US’s brand-new president, unveiled last weekend at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, represents a departure from form radical enough to raise the eyebrow of even the most slogan-weary watcher of [...]

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Irish, But Not As New York Knows It: Irish Theatre in NY, 2008

First published: The Irish Times, December 17, 2008
YOU’RE IN A MIDTOWN Manhattan theatre. It’s the opening night of an Irish musical comedy about espionage and intrigue during World War II. Around you in the audience are some people who’ve seen the show before – in Ireland or in Edinburgh – and some who haven’t. [...]

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The Art of Influence

First Published in The Gloss Magazine, Ireland, November 2008
 
Scavenged from the cheap seats at last month’s New York fashion week, a grab bag of the influences we’re all meant to be sporting this season: Sci-Fi, Fetish, Deco, the designs of Alexander Girard, The Women (the 1939 original, not the new embarrassment), the late Yves Saint [...]

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