West Wicklow Festival 2021

West Wicklow Festival
Peter Regan & Phoebe White

So many opportunites to create atmosphere!” – Rising Stars

Prize-Winning Composition Performance

Congratulations to Phoebe White and Peter Regan on their stunning performance in the 2021 West Wicklow Festival.

The entire recital performance from London and is now available to watch on YouTube. The Rising Star Recital, where among Beethoven and Bartok, the fabulous Violin and Piano duo perform Citadel of Light. Programme notes for the recital and the entire festival are here: West Wicklow Festival 2021 Programme.

 – I am delighted that my most recent work for Violin and Piano is selected as the winning entry in the 2021 West Wicklow Festival Competition for chamber music composition.

Phoebe White (Violin) and Peter Regan (Piano) perform ‘Citadel of Light‘ at the festival on 31st May 2021 at 8pm (BST). The performance will be streaming online from London in compliance with current restrictions. 

FREE tickets for the online streaming event and further details of this performance and the other festival performances can be found at:  Programme | West Wicklow Festival

A little about the piece . . .

Citadel of Light joins several other works by Garry Wilkinson for Violin and Piano. La Legende de L’Oiseau Bleu, a substantial work, also completed early in 2021, is set as ATCL recital performance repertoire. Constellations Set I, a series of eleven pieces for Violin and Piano, comes from publisher’s Trinity/Faber, while many of the pieces are in grade syllabus lists. Exotic Birds is an album of 24 unaccompanied pieces for solo Violin. These pieces take early players through more intricate pieces that carefully grade step by step.

Citadel of Light is especially for the Violin and Piano duo of Phoebe White and Peter Regan. As with many recent compositions, the inspiration for the work is comes from places of outstanding natural beauty. The title is an English translation of the original Brittonic-Celtic (Welsh) placename, ‘Dinas Oleu‘. It is an ancient hilltop site in the historic county of Merionethshire at the mouth of the river, Afon Mawddach. This river flows out into the Irish Sea on Cardigan Bay in west Wales. The site faces west rising quickly as a breath-taking hill-walk from the town of Barmouth. It also looks out to the Llyn Peninsula to the north. It is a place of such outstanding, natural beauty that in the year 1895, The National Trust acquired it as the first land protected as the UK’s preservation and conservation body,