Gulliver's Travels & Vivaldi's Four Seasons

Part of the Dublin Swift Festival 2026, marking 300 years since the publication of Gulliver's Travels, tonight's concert brings together music and literature in a programme rooted in the city itself.   Opening the programme is the overture from Messiah, first performed in Dublin in 1742. Handel had intended it for St Patrick's Cathedral, but permission was refused by its then Dean, a certain Jonathan Swift, and the premiere instead took place in the Music Hall on Fishamble Street.   Georg Philipp Telemann's Gulliver Suite, written shortly after the publication of Swift's novel, transforms its fantastical worlds into musical form. Each movement reflects a different episode, from the tiny Lilliputians and the giants of Brobdingnag, to the dreamlike abstractions of Laputa and the contrasting civility and savagery of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, turning Swift's satire into a sequence of vivid musical scenes.   We then have Bach's Concerto for Two Violins, one of his best-loved instrumental works, with the two soloists weaving around one another in music of elegance, balance and expressive beauty.   The evening culminates in Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, here presented with texts by Jonathan Swift. One of the most famous and vivid works in all classical music, it transforms the natural world into a sequence of brilliant musical scenes, from birdsong and harvest celebrations to storms, frost and winter ice.