The countdown to August has quietly begun.
Kilkenny Arts Festival returns from 6 to 16 August 2026, and the first wave of its classical programme has just been announced — a run of concerts that brings some of Ireland’s finest performance ensembles into the medieval grandeur of St Canice’s Cathedral, alongside the Irish premiere of one of the most talked-about pieces of concert theatre to come out of London this year.
It’s a line-up built around a simple notion: big concerts with big ideas.
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The Festival’s two ensembles in residence, Crash Ensemble and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, anchor the programme, joined by Chamber Choir Ireland and a welcome return for organist and keyboard player James McVinnie. And at the centre of it all sits Death of Gesualdo, a dark, theatrical reimagining of a Renaissance murder story that has already left critics reaching for superlatives.
Here’s what we know so far, and why each of these is worth blocking out a night in August for.
The centrepiece: Death of Gesualdo
Thursday 13 August 2026, 9pm, St Canice’s Cathedral
If you were among the crowds who packed out Secret Byrd at last year’s Festival (it sold out four times over), then the team behind it needs little introduction. Director Bill Barclay returns in 2026 with Death of Gesualdo, a new blend of music and theatre that trades Byrd’s quiet devotion for something altogether more lurid.
Carlo Gesualdo was an Italian nobleman revered among Renaissance composers for his madrigals; those unaccompanied, secular songs written for multiple voices that still sound startlingly modern centuries on. He is also remembered, rather less flatteringly, for murdering his wife and her lover in their bed.
Death of Gesualdo tells the story of that extraordinary life, with the acclaimed vocal group The Gesualdo Six performing alongside a troupe of silent actors who conjure everyone from a jester to a sinister cardinal. Choreography comes from Will Tuckett, with costumes by Arthur Oliver.
The result, by all accounts, is a sensory feast – macabre, beautiful and genuinely spellbinding. The Times called the staging, singing and acting “sublime”, while The Guardian judged The Gesualdo Six simply “outstanding”. Catching its Irish premiere within the hushed stone of St Canice’s feels like exactly the right setting for a tale this gothic.
Land of Winter from Crash Ensemble
Friday 7 August 2026, 9pm, St Canice’s Cathedral
There’s a particular thrill to hearing Crash Ensemble perform the work of their own co-founder, and Land of Winter promises to be one of the most moving nights of this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival. This major new piece comes from composer Donnacha Dennehy, conceived during a trip to Iceland and written as an ode to the country he comes from.
The Romans called Ireland Hibernia, the “land of winter”, and it’s the singular quality of Irish light that runs through the whole work. Across twelve movements (twelve “months”) Dennehy traces the interplay of light and time, from the short grey days and glancing sun of midwinter through to those long summer evenings when brightness lingers almost to midnight. It’s a celebration of cyclical time, layered with overlapping sounds, colours and rhythms, and this Grammy Award-winning score has been timed beautifully to unfold against the setting late-summer sun.
James McVinnie returns to St Canice’s
Saturday 8 August 2026, 7pm, St Canice’s Cathedral
It has been 11 years since James McVinnie filled St Canice’s Cathedral with his sold-out performance of Bach’s Art of Fugue back in 2015. In the time since, he has built a stellar international career as an organist and keyboard player, championing the great classical composers and contemporary voices like Gabriella Smith in equal measure; his album Counterpoint memorably set Bach alongside Philip Glass.
For his upcoming trip to Kilkenny, he turns again to Bach, with a programme for both piano and organ drawn from a body of work he knows intimately, having recently recorded the Clavierübung III to considerable acclaim. Expect a generous spread across Bach’s output: the Italian Concerto, which McVinnie cheerfully describes as “a riot for the fingers”, selections from the Well-Tempered Clavier — one of the cornerstones of Western music — and the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, home to some of Bach’s most glorious writing.
Chamber Choir Ireland: Forgotten Peoples
Monday 10 August 2026, 6.30pm, St Canice’s Cathedral
Chamber Choir Ireland returns with a programme that lingers in the mind long after the final note: a meditation on identity, belonging, and the lives of the marginalised and dispossessed, conducted by Gabriel Crouch.
At its heart is Forgotten Peoples, the great Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s cycle of choral works celebrating six minority cultures of the Baltic region, paired with American composer Michael Gordon’s Anonymous Man, a piece inspired by the homeless people he encountered on the streets of Tribeca during the years when that part of New York was still an industrial district.
Around these sit two brand-new works commissioned by the choir: Emma O’Halloran’s gone, which draws on the testimony of people who have experienced homelessness in Ireland over the past decade, and Francisco del Pino’s Index, a tribute to the Irish diaspora and the thousands who emigrated to Argentina in the nineteenth century.
It’s a programme with real weight to it, and one that should resonate well beyond the cathedral walls.
Irish Chamber Orchestra diving into the supernatural
Friday 14 August 2026, 7.30pm, St Canice’s Cathedral
To close out this first run of announcements, the Irish Chamber Orchestra invites you on a journey through the supernatural imagination of Europe: saints and sorcerers, devils and dancing witches, storms, ghosts and the twilight of the Norse gods.
Devised and directed by the orchestra’s Artistic Partner Henning Kraggerud, this vividly theatrical programme threads together music by Vivaldi, Mozart, Schubert, Mussorgsky and others into a single world of elemental drama. There’s the icy fury of The Four Seasons, the demonic brilliance of Tartini’s Devil’s Trill, Mussorgsky’s cackling Baba Yaga, and Kraggerud’s own apocalyptic Ragnarok — a concert where myth, folklore and sheer virtuosity collide.
A fittingly dramatic note to end on.
The essentials
Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from 6-16 August this year, and these are only the first highlights of the classical strand, with more announcements and the full multi-artform programme still to come.
If a trip to the Marble City is on the cards, it’s well worth planning around a night or two under the roof of St Canice’s.
The first wave at a glance
- Fri 7 Aug, 9pm: Land of Winter (Crash Ensemble)
- Sat 8 Aug, 7pm: James McVinnie: Bach for organ and piano
- Mon 10 Aug, 6.30pm: Chamber Choir Ireland: Forgotten Peoples
- Thu 13 Aug, 9pm: Death of Gesualdo
- Fri 14 Aug, 7.30pm: Irish Chamber Orchestra: a supernatural journey
All concerts above take place at St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, and tickets are on sale now. For booking, ticket bundles and the full programme as it’s revealed, head to kilkennyarts.ie.
