A SOUTH Belfast-based contemporary music group brought their talents to Poland for a special performance at a major festival.
Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble performed in Warsaw last Friday as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025.
The performance at the AżTak Festival of Contemporary Music was a key moment in a year-long international collaboration with Warsaw’s Hashtag Ensemble, titled Against Adversity. Together, these pioneering groups are exploring how composers respond to conflict, constraint and cultural identity through bold and thought-provoking new music.
The Warsaw concert featured works by Greg Caffrey, Amy Rooney, and Ryan Molloy, each reflecting the festival’s 2025 theme of Contemplation – music that is deeply personal, reflective, and rooted in lived experience.
Speaking about the project’s origins, Hard Rain’s Artistic Director, Aisling Agnew, said: “We were thinking about how composers here in Northern Ireland have started to reflect differently on conflict, especially in the years since the Troubles. Not necessarily just political conflict, but the everyday struggles people face, and how we break free from those. It’s about resilience, identity, and transformation.
“There’s a real kinship between us and Hashtag.
“They’re experimental, collaborative, and they began the same year we did. We didn’t want this to be just two groups sharing a stage – we embedded musicians into each other’s ensembles to create something more genuinely shared.”
Earlier this year, the collaboration saw two acclaimed performances in Belfast. Songs of Travel, an immersive audiovisual concert, addressed themes of migration and climate change, while Pierrette, marking International Women’s Day, showcased cross-border works by six women composers from Northern Ireland and Poland, exploring identity, gender, and representation.
“We wanted to reflect what Belfast is today, how much it’s changed,” added Aisling.
“The music ranges from tense and unsettling to joyful and uplifting.
“This project isn’t just about music. It’s about opening space for shared understanding and showing how different people reflect on adversity and finding common ground through art.”
The final stage of the collaboration will take place this September at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, where Hard Rain will present Evolutionary Environments, combining multimedia work featuring live performance merged with field recordings and ambient soundscapes.
