“It’s an honour to be there, to help normalise something that I do every day. Little girls everywhere will see this and say, ‘I think I’ll do that.’ That’s what we want.”
I love getting the chance to celebrate women’s achievements on this site and as I listened to Eimear Noone’s interview with Ray Darcy on radio yesterday, I just knew I’d have to write about her.
Galway-born Eimear Noone will be the first female ever to take charge of the orchestra at the Academy Awards when she conducts excerpts from the five nominated scores.
Her casual reference to her friendship with music was lovely as she described her feelings of nerves ahead of the big event. “I’d be dead inside if I didn’t have any concerns. Luckily for me, I have friends in the orchestra and I have friends on the page in front of me, ” she said.”The background changes, but the little black dots on the page are always home for me. No matter what country I’m in or what concert hall, it doesn’t matter – the score is where my mind and my heart are.”
Eimear’s career flourished in LA where she moved when “Ireland wouldn’t even give her a chance to fail”. While she has conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, l’Orchestre symphonique de Bretagne, the Sydney Symphony, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, several other national orchestras and was the first woman to conduct at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, she is best known for her award-winning work on video game music.
When asked if she did the tap tap tap at the start of a performance ( to bring the orchestra to attention) she answered that the conductor should never do a solo! What humour! What humility!
Listen to her interview on the Ray Darcy podcast (24 Feb)
Watch her performances on You Tube. And certainly watch her on Oscar night, Feb 10th when she conducts music from the films: Little Women, The Joker, 1917, Star Wars and Marriage Story ……our Irish winner regardless of results.
