The 2025 – 26 season sees Martin curate a celebration of Irish traditional music at Cork Opera House, return to the Belfast International Festival and Concertgebouw Amsterdam and debut at Rheingau Music Festival with the Martin Hayes Quartet. In spring 2026 he will curate and lead a major Irish music celebration featuring the Common Ground Ensemble, launching at the National Concert Hall in Dublin before embarking on a U.S. tour. The centrepiece of the tour will be a landmark concert at Carnegie Hall on Saint Patrick’s Day, inaugurating a new tradition annual tradition. Joined by special guests, the performances will blend Irish music, song, dance, spoken word and contemporary interpretations of Irish culture. Kyle Sanna Kyle is a Brooklyn-based guitarist and composer whose musical work spans four divergent disciplines – contemporary composition; jazz and improvisation; the traditional music of Ireland; and music, technology and production. He studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. His recent releases include The City Sleeps (traditional Irish tunes on solo guitar), Everything Again Is New (an album of algorithmic electronic music) and Ground Patrol’s Converge (conceptual improvisations). An album featuring Undone Landscape , his 30-minute piece for clarinet, percussion, string orchestra and live electronics, written and performed by Kinan Azmeh and The Knights will appear on Phenotypic Recordings in 2027. Kyle’s compositions have been performed at venues around the world, have featured in two recent Ken Burns’ films and he has received commissions from artists including Brooklyn Rider, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Palaver Strings and soprano Daniela Birrittella. His ‘ruminative and shape-shifting’ ( San Francisco Chronicle ) work for string quartet Sequence for Minor White won First Prize in the 2018 Charlottle New Music Festival Composition Competition.
Kyle has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums. In 2025 his arrangements were performed at Carnegie Hall by The Knights and in Dublin by Martin Hayes and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra. His arrangements have appeared on The Colbert Report , NPR’s Performance Today , and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, In a Circle and Naive labels. In addition to his composing and arranging, Kyle performs regularly as an improvising guitarist with Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand, Ground Patrol and We The Gleaners, and he performs music based in the Irish tradition with Martin Hayes, Seamus Egan, Maeve Gilchrist and Dana Lyn. He is equally at home in the recording studio as on the stage and has produced nine full length albums by various artists. Robert Zielinski & Manuela Centanni With fiddle and wooden flute, Robert and Manuela enjoy bringing you on a musical journey from Ireland to Australia, with their unique tone, arrangements, unison playing and harmonies. With only the sound and style of his favourite record, the seminal album All-Ireland Champions with Martin Hayes’ dad P.J. Hayes, Paddy Canny, Peadar O’Loughlin and Bridie Lafferty, as his guide, Robert landed in Martin’s hometown of Feakle in East Clare when he was 17, not knowing anyone there. In Feakle, Robert spent a total of 10 months over two summers, working as a gardener and learning from these masters of the tradition. It was here he met Martin, who was home from the US for the whole summer. In the winter, Martin went back to America and recorded his first album, and the rest is history.
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