The Road to Dublin

Internationally Acclaimed Baroque Orchestra Apollo’s Fire Comes to Tannersville this October

By Sarah Beling

The joyful, soaring sounds and haunting melodies of Celtic fiddles, Irish whistles, and more will converge in Tannersville when internationally-acclaimed baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire comes to the Catskills for a one-night-only concert October 21 at 7:30 pm.

The Grammy Award-winning ensemble—named for the ancient Greek god of music, healing, and the sun—will present The Road to Dublin, an evening-long tribute to the sounds of the Emerald Isle and its tradition of traveling bards. October’s program features Irish singer Fiona Gillespie as well as compositions that showcase flutes, cellos, harpsichords, the hammered dulcimer, Irish whistles, and of course, fiddles. The piece is part of a wide-ranging repertoire of works for the Cleveland, Ohio-based orchestra, which was founded in 1992 and is led by Artistic Director and conductor Jeannette Sorrell. Other 2023 programming includes Handel’s Israel in Egypt, Nights in Venice, and Wassail! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas—just a few of the selections that the orchestra has taken on tour across the U.S. and Europe at such well-known venues as Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, Stanford University, Heidelberg University, the Wilsey Center for Opera, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Apollo’s Fire is based in Cleveland, but we are a group of wandering minstrels—we are on the road a lot!” says Sorrell, noting that the group has recently come off of a season of sold-out shows at the Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, North Carolina and the renowned Ravinia Festival in Chicago. Last spring, they completed their sixth European tour, which included concerts at St Martin-in-the Fields in London and a debut at the Heidelberg International Spring Festival in Germany. Apollo’s Fire has also in recent years added a new series of performances around the Greater Chicago area to much critical acclaim and local interest. “It’s been exciting to see how quickly our audience there has grown,” says Sorrell. “Last year our Christmas concert in Chicago sold out two weeks in advance.”

In addition to touring, the orchestra has recorded 30 commercial CDs, with 11 reaching best-seller status on the Billboard Classical chart. In 2019, the group received a Grammy Award for their album Songs of Orpheus and currently boasts over 14 million views on their YouTube channel, thanks in part to the orchestra’s popular quarantine project, the Worldwide Watch-at-Home series. And when they aren’t rehearsing, performing, or recording themselves, Sorrell and her ensemble are guiding the next generation of young musical talent, through their audition-based Apollo’s Musettes Ensemble, an artistic leadership mentoring program, and the Community Access Initiative—which aims to expand greater access to as well as socioeconomic and racial diversity in the classical music industry with training and outreach from the MOSAIC Project as well as free student ticketing and family concerts. They’ve also taken the lead in creating a nonprofit community arts center, ArtsPlace, which will transform a historic Cleveland church into a world-class concert hall, rehearsal space, and sanctuary.

The orchestra’s ambitious schedule is part of Apollo’s Fire’s mission to spread the 17th and 18th century baroque ideal “that music should evoke the various affekts, or passions, in the listeners,” says Sorrell. “Baroque composers and music teachers always wrote that the role of the performer was to move the emotional moods of the listeners. They used the word ‘Affekt,’ which means emotional mood,” she adds. “If you think about it, this is the goal of folk singer-songwriters today, but this concept got lost for a couple of centuries. In much of the 20th century, musicians were playing baroque music in a stiff way. In Apollo’s Fire, we try to recreate the emotional communication that this music was meant to have.”

In creating the right blend of structure and affekt for The Road to Dublin, Sorrel turned to inspiration from a previous piece, Sugarloaf Mountain: An Appalachian Gathering, the recording of which debuted at #5 on the UK Billboard Classical Crossover Chart in 2015. “People might want to listen to it before coming to see The Road to Dublin,” says Sorrell, noting that Road to Dublin is a “creative sequel” to Sugarloaf. “Sugarloaf is the name of a mountain in Ireland and also a mountain in the Appalachian hills in the U.S. Both of these programs explore the Celtic roots of Appalachian music—how the Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their music with them and built new lives in the Appalachian mountains, and their music took on new influences and eventually became what we call Appalachian or Roots music,” she adds. “The Sugarloaf program is more Appalachian, and Road to Dublin is more Irish, focusing on the experience of the Irish migrants who fled from the Irish Potato Famine in the 1850’s, and bravely crossed the Atlantic to build new lives in America.”

When Sorrell began working on Road to Dublin in 2022, she focused on telling a moving story of migrants far from home. “My priority in designing these programs of historical folk music is always to have a dramatic arc—to take the listener through a series of emotional moods that leaves them feeling somehow uplifted at the end,” she says. The creative process was also a collaborative one—after premiering the piece in Cleveland last summer, Sorrell and company made small tweaks to the final product. “I consult with my musicians in order to include pieces that they feel especially connected to—pieces where each of them can shine,” she says. “But the order and shape of the program— putting it into sets that shape the mood—those things are my responsibility.”

As Tannersville audiences take in the shape and mood of The Road to Dublin, Sorrell hopes that they’ll be inspired by the history and influence of all immigrants on American culture. “I hope that our audience in Catskill will come away with a new understanding of the Irish immigrant experience, which has shaped American music,” says Sorrell. “I hope they may also be moved to think about the immigrant experience in general — whether Irish, Latin American, African, Asian, or whatever. When you hear this music and you hear the stories of the people who brought the music with them, you realize that immigration has been a beautiful part of our heritage in America.”

Apollo’s Fire: The Road to Dublin will be performed on Saturday, October 21 at 7:30 pm at the Orpheum Performing Arts Center, 6050 Main Street in Tannersville, NY 12485. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit catskillmtn.org.