Festival concert featuring Chris Newman and Mire N Chathasaigh

Chris Newman and Mire N Chathasaigh have worked professionally and toured internationally as a duo for many years, but they are perhaps even better known individually for their virtuoso playing of the guitar and Irish harp respectively.Chris Newman is one of the world's finest flat-picking guitarists and a gifted improviser.

He began to play guitar at the age of four and at fourteen played his first paid gig in a folk club.As a guitarist, he has toured and recorded with musicians from a range of genres.

In the folk world, he has played with the Boys of the Lough, Aly Bain, Kathryn Tickell and Danny Thompson.

He has played with leading figures from the world of jazz such as jazz luminaries such as Stphane Grappelli, Diz Disley and Danny Thompson and Fred Wedlock and the Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra from the world of comedy.

A prolific composer, arranger and record producer, he received a silver disc for producing Fred's international hit The Oldest Swinger in Town.Since the mid-1980s, Chris has concentrated on composition, the traditional music of these islands and beyond, and bluegrass and its intersection with swing jazz - he is one of the most highlyregarded American-style flatpickers in the world who are not from the US.

He was principal guitar and mandolin tutor for Newcastle Universitys Folk B.Mus degree course for twenty-one years, since its inception, and many of his alumni form the new wave of British acoustic guitarists and mandolinists.His book of guitar compositions and arrangements, Adventures with a Flatpick, was published in 2001.

Breaking Bach, Chris' most recent solo album of his arrangements for steel-strung flatpicked guitar of sonatas and partitas written by JS Bach for solo instruments was released in July 2021.Mire N Chathasaigh grew up in a well-known West Cork musical family, steeped in the oral Irish tradition.

Her mother na, a native of Allihies, Beara, Co Cork , was a fine singer and harmonica-player who grew up playing for sets and dancing in them!; there were lots of musicians on both the O'Sullivan and Dwyer sides of her family, Una taught Mire her first songs as a toddler, taught her to play her first dance tunes (slides and polkas) and her first Irish dances.Mire was already proficient in a variety of other instruments by the time that she began to play the harp at the age of eleven.

As there was no prior tradition in Ireland of playing Irish dance music on a harp, she used her existing knowledge of the idiom of the oral Irish tradition to develop a variety of new techniques - particularly in relation to ornamentation - that made it possible for the first time to play this music on the harp in a stylistically accurate way - 'a single-handed reinvention of the harp'.

Her approach sharply diverged from the established norms of 20th century Irish harping up to that point.

Mire's originality was quickly recognised and she made a number of TV and radio broadcasts as a teenager, going on to win the All-Ireland and Pan-Celtic Harp Competitions on several occasions.As a solo artist, she performed throughout Europe and the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s and made many TV and radio broadcasts in Ireland.

She went on to perform internationally, playing at numerous harp festivals and perform with other leading musicians, most notably with her sister Nollaig, violinist and traditional fiddler and her husband the late Arty McGlynn and sometimes with both her two sisters as the Casey Sisters.Maire is a recipient of Irish traditional musics most prestigious award, Musician of the Year awarded by the Irish language TV station TG4 for the excellence and pioneering force of her music, the remarkable growth she has brought to the music of the harp and for the positive influence she has had on the young generation of harpers.Chris and Maires duo has been described as the celebrated partnership of a brilliant English master of the acoustic guitar (THE DAILY TELEGRAPH) with the doyenne of Irish harpers (SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY) This duo has presented its unique musical vision in twenty-four countries on five continents to venues ranging from the tiniest of village halls to palaces in Kyoto and Istanbul, Londons Barbican, Cologne's Philharmonie, and Town Halls from Sydney to Seattle.Our festival concert will have two support acts, a New Roots 2026 finalist plus the winner of the 2025 Watford Folk Club songwriting competition, Callum Granger, whose set will include his winning song,