The first half will consist of music by William Byrd who died in 1623, exactly 400 years ago. Byrd was a contemporary of Edmund Spenser who lived at the medieval Kilcolman Castle, near Doneraile, where he wrote much of his epic poem, ‘The Faerie Queen’. Malcolm Proud has chosen music which relates to Queen Elizabeth, Spenser, Shakespeare and other important historical figures of the time.

Doneraile Court was built in the 1720s though altered subsequently. The second half of the recital consists of preludes and fugues from Book 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier issued in 1722, and a suite of dances and character pieces from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s set of harpsichord pieces published in Paris in 1724. Malcolm Proud will perform on a harpsichord built by the workshop of Adlam and Burnett at Finchcocks in Kent in 1974. It is a copy of a 1638 ‘Ruckers’ harpsichord from the Russell Collection of Early Keyboard Instruments at Edinburgh University.

Malcolm Proud won first prize at the Edinburgh International Harpsichord Competition in 1982 after a year of study with Gustav Leonhardt. He is harpsichordist and organist with the Irish Baroque Orchestra and Camerata Kilkenny and performs with Chamber Choir Ireland, Resurgam and Sestina. His international career has included playing all six Brandenburg Concertos with Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists at the BBC London Proms and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, and he has worked with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Academy of Ancient Music, European Union Baroque Orchestra and Akademie für alte Musik Berlin. He has toured Japan in a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with Mark Padmore in the lead rôle.

In 2018 he curated a series of concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin marking the 350th anniversary of François Couperin’s birth, and in 2022 he performed Book 1 of Bach’s ‘Well-tempered Clavier’ using both harpsichord and chamber organ at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin marking the 300th anniversary of the appearance of this seminal work.

Malcolm Proud is Emeritus Organist at St Canice’s Cathedral Kilkenny and has given recitals on historic organs such as the 15th century instrument at Valère-Sion in Switzerland, the 1565 Antegnati in Mantua, the 1610 Compenius at Frederiksborg in Denmark and the 1766 Riepp at Ottobeuren near Munich. He has given organ recitals in Boston and Virginia. His cd recordings include Purcell’s Harpsichord music, Bach’s Six Partitas, the Goldberg Variations and (on organ) Clavierübung III. He has recorded Brandenburg 5 with both the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the English Baroque Soloists.

This concert is being presented by the OPW as part of the cultural programme at Doneraile Court.
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