'Letters Home' - Three Christine Tobin shows over two days at the Irish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith. July 19-20

Christine Tobin will be presenting three different programs of music over 2 days at the Irish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith, London on July 19th and 20th.

The programs are:

Saturday, 19th July - 7.30pm 'Returning Weather' https://irishculturalcentre.co.uk/event/shining-a-spotlight-on-christine-tobin/

Christine Tobin vocals/compositions, Aoife Ní Bhriain violin/viola, David Power uilleann pipes/whistles, Phil Robson guitar/electronics and Steve Hamilton piano.

Returning Weather, imaginatively weaves song, spoken word and a stellar group of musicians from diverse disciplines together, creating a multi-dimensional sound-world which blends influences from folk, 20th-century art song and jazz. While the live shows expand upon the material with additional spoken word passages and visual effects, the album is a concise collection of nine compositions. It charts a journey which is part homecoming, part memoir, inspired by Christine’s return to Ireland after many years abroad and explores themes of finding home, dwelling and landscape, reconnecting with a cultural background, reshaping a sense of identity and belonging.

Sunday, 20th July 3pm - 'Letters Home' https://irishculturalcentre.co.uk/event/christine-tobin-letters-home/

Christine Tobin singer-songwriter and Phil Robson guitarist present a film they compiled, interspersed with live music called ‘Letters Home’. The documentary film celebrates those who emigrated to find work in the U.K. and farther afield during the second half of the 20th century. Hear the stories of six people from the Boyle, Frenchpark and Ballaghaderreen area, recorded in their own voices, interwoven with live music, song and a visual backdrop of images & photographs that recount their experiences, stretching from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Christine and Phil created the film based on their accounts of life then, both at home in Ireland and in the countries they travelled to in search of work. The title Letters Home is an acknowledgement of the important contribution emigrants made to the Irish economy by sending money back home to their families during this period. 

Sunday, 20th July 7.30pm - 'Sailing to Byzantium' https://irishculturalcentre.co.uk/event/christine-tobin-sailing-to-byzantium/

Christine Tobin vocals, arrangements & composition; Gareth Lockrane flutes; Phil Robson guitar; Steve Hamilton piano: Kate Shortt cello; Dave Whitford double bass.

Tobin presents her award winning 'Sailing To Byzantium' programme which will feature a selection of 12 beautiful musical settings of poems by W.B Yeats taken from Christine’s award winning album of the same name, for which she won a British Composer Award, (IVORS AWARD). The poems are chosen from Yeats’s early work through to his final collection and include love poems such as When You Are Old, written for the unattainable love of his life Maud Gonne;  also Yeats’s poems Sailing To Byzantium and Long-legged Fly’; plus a chance to hear Christine’s awesome interpretation of Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” and her haunting rendition of  “The Song of Wandering Aengus”.

Christine’s works with the poems on a deep intuitive level creating music that draws you into a world of hypnotic soulfulness.