Rochfortbridge link to European Medical Student Choir tour

A Rochfortbridge man is one of the team organising a series of charity concerts in Ireland by the European Medical Student Orchestra and Choir this month.

The concerts, on August 19-21 at Birr, Galway and Dublin, are fundraising for charities local to the three counties. The first is for Offaly Hospice, the second for Galway Hospice and the third for Friends of St Luke’s in Dublin.

While there is no concert in Westmeath, Rochfortbridge man and student doctor Eoin Fallon, a member of EMSOC for several years, is working with five other committee members to make sure everything runs smoothly.

“EMSOC was created about 36 years ago and every year it goes to a different European country and performs beneficiary concerts for local charities,” said Eoin. “This year it’s about 21 nationalities, and they arrive in Ireland on August 13.

“We’ll be based in Roscrea so we’ll practice for five or six days fairly intensively and then perform three charity concerts.”

As their title states the orchestra is made up of medical students from across the continent. We’re all students in healthcare,” explains Eoin, “doctors, nurses, physios, any sort of healthcare.”

Eoin is training to be a doctor and recently completed a residency in radiation oncology. On top of his training, he has been absolutely overtaken by planning these three concerts.

“There’s 110 in total, 70 in the orchestra, 40 in the choir.

“We first have to organise accommodation for all of that, plus transport and food. One of the most challenging things for me was to organise a non-profit. I have no background in finance or any sort of law at all.

“So that was a massive learning curve just getting that up in going, and now I’m the CEO of a non-profit organisation.”

There’s also the factor of deciding who will be taking part in the concert. “You have to organise the venues, you organise your repertoire.

“One of the major tasks is that entry to the orchestra and choir is audition-based, so you have applications online and then it’s video analysis.

“Then we have to rank them all in terms of quality, but we also have quotas where we try and have 40% new members, 60% returning members.

“We also have to try to make it as diverse as possible ,with as many countries as we can.

“So we have all of these filtering processes to actually get the orchestra itself together.”

Music has been a part of Eoin’s life for as long as he can remember. Starting on piano, he moved on to the flute later in life.

While medicine and science are the path he has chosen, he has never forgotten his passion for music.

“I started playing the flute when I was 10 and have been playing the piano since I was three or four. I always took it seriously. Even in school I was practising for maybe one or two hours a day even up to the Leaving Cert.

“My undergrad was in physics but I took a year out between my undergrad and masters, where I studied music full time.

“I did a diploma in performance in the Royal Academy of Music.”

The charity concerts will provide a variety of musical styles and will be delivered in three parts.

“We’re a classical orchestra but the way the concert is run is that we’ll have the orchestra on their own first then we have the choir on their own. Then the orchestra and choir together.

“So the orchestra will be classical and the choir are predominantly trad, and it’s Irish composers for all of it.”

A key trait of EMSOC performances is making sure the traditional music of the host country is represented, and this year’s concerts will feature numerous Irish songs and music from Riverdance.

Tickets are going fast. While the Birr night is fully booked, there are places available for the event at Galway Cathedral; it is free, though attendees are asked to donate if they can.

There are tickets available for the performance in the Helix on August 21 via the Helix website.