No composer on this festival's programme belongs to this landscape more than Ernest John Moeran. Born in 1894 to an Anglo-Irish clergyman, he grew up among the Norfolk marshes, took a piece of shrapnel to the head at the Western Front in 1917, and spent the rest of his life writing music that seems permanently wind-blown, and collecting folk songs the old way, by standing rounds in pubs until the singing started.
Ireland claimed him by degrees. From the 1930s his true home was Kenmare in County Kerry, where the mountains of the south-west worked their way into his Symphony in G minor, the Violin Concerto, and the late Cello Concerto written for his wife, the cellist Peers Coetmore. Friends said you could map his walks through the hills onto the phrases of his slow movements.
He died at Kenmare pier in December 1950, collapsing into the water he had spent a lifetime describing. His music, lyrical, weathered, undervalued for decades, has been finding its listeners ever since; hearing it played again in Kerry is a kind of homecoming.
