About

Selected by The Arts Council as a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Bursary 2020, Aoife is a member of the Opalio Piano Trio and the Banbha String Quartet, supported by the National String Quartet Foundation.

An avid chamber musician, Aoife has collaborated with The Vanbrugh, the ConTempo String Quartet, Musici Ireland and the Gavin Bryars, Kirkos, Ficino and Crash Ensembles, and has performed at numerous national and international music festivals, including the National Concert Hall Chamber Music Gathering, the NCH Perspectives Series, West Cork Chamber Music Festival (where she recorded for RTÉ Lyric FM), Music in Drumcliffe, New Music Dublin, Cork Midsummer Festival, Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano, the Aurora Chamber Music Festival (Sweden) and Barry Douglas’ Clandeboye Festival, where she was awarded the Special Festival Prize. She has appeared in recital all over Ireland, including as part of the Crawford Art Gallery’s Summer Lunchtime Concert Series, Music for Wexford Series, Castletown House Concert Series, NUIG’s Arts in Action Series (in association with Music for Galway) and the Galway Music Residency’s 3 Kinds of Music Series, among others.

Her love for chamber music was fostered, in tandem with many other influences, during a Chamber Studio mentorship with the Shandon String Trio under Richard Lester at King’s Place, London. She currently holds a residency at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork City, where she curates the 6 Summertime Concerts Series and the Spotlight Chamber Music Series, which she founded in 2017. Her numerous national prizes and awards include the RTÉ Lyric FM Award, Hazel de Courcy Lewis Cup, Bach Prize and Clyde Twelvetrees Cup at Feis Ceoil, Dublin and the Capuchin Order Perpetual Cup and Bursary at Feis Maitiú, Cork.

Aoife studied at undergraduate level with Emma Ferrand at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, graduating in 2014 with a first-class honours Bachelor of Music degree and an LRSM Diploma in Performance with Distinction. For her third year, she undertook an Erasmus study exchange to the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen, Germany, where she joined the cello class of Christoph Richter and the chamber music class of Andreas Reiner.

During the course of her studies, Aoife won the Raphael Sommer Music Scholarship and partook in the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme. She has participated in masterclasses with such renowned cellists as Raphael Wallfisch, Ralph Kirshbaum, Miklós Perényi and Frans Helmerson. Aoife subsequently obtained a Master’s Degree in Arts with Distinction from the CIT Cork School of Music, where she studied under Christopher Marwood, and pursued further study on the Performance Certificate Course (Corso di Perfezionamento) at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, Italy, with Paolo Bonomini and Francesco Dillon.

As an orchestral player, Aoife has toured Europe, China and the United Arab Emirates extensively with such orchestras as the European Union Youth Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Sinfonia Cymru, the RTÉ Orchestras, Camerata Ireland and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, recording for BBC Radio 3, Naxos, Signum Classics and Alpha Classics. She has performed at the BBC Proms and at the Würzburg Mozart, Naantali, Aldeburgh and Cheltenham Festivals, and in halls around the world including the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, the Royal Opera of Versailles, Konzerthaus Berlin, Snape Maltings and the Royal Albert Hall, under notable conductors such as Vasily Petrenko, Jörg Widmann, Krzysztof Urbański and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Aoife has appeared as soloist with orchestra several times both at home and abroad. Her début with the New York Concerti Sinfonietta in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 2016 was described as “a thing of beauty…intelligent, poised, and refined”. (The Epoch Times)