Tadhg Sudlow
Violin - Viola - Fiddle
As a versatile musician, Tadhg has experience as a historical violinist and violist across Europe and Australia. He regularly performs with the Irish Baroque Orchestra and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, also leading and performing with freelance ensembles at home in the Netherlands. Alongside an early music career, Tadhg is a traditional Irish music player, forming trad band The Hár in Australia as a fiddle and banjo player, most recently touring in Edinburgh and Dublin. This knowledge of the oral traditions in Irish music combined with a dedication to performance research resulted in the concert concepts of Trad meets Baroque.
About
Tadhg Sudlow is an internationally performing historically informed violinist and violist. Irish and Australian, they grew up in Perth, Western Australia, studying modern and early music with Shaun Lee-Chen and Paul Wright. He spent six months travelling, studying, and performing in the UK and Ireland before completing a Masters in Early Music at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Antoinette Lohmann and Shunske Sato (2025).Tadhg has performed for festivals in Norway, Poland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium. As an ambassador and viola player with Theresia Orchestra, he was the principal viola for the orchestra’s recently released recording of Rex Salomon Oratorio. Tadhg was a viola apprentice with the Irish Baroque Orchestra in 2023, now performing regularly with the orchestra, and collaborating in presenting Trad meets Baroque for Dublin HandelFest in 2024 and 2025. Tadhg is also a violist with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra in Sydney. As a violinist he works with freelance ensembles in the Netherlands, most recently as a guest concertmaster with Eik en Linde Ensemble for two tours of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion. Tadhg’s Irish music background informed a short course that they taught at the Utrecht HKU Conservatorium in 2023, and this background in the oral tradition influences much of his professional practice.Tadhg has focused on developing their own research-led practice with the support of incredible teachers, prioritising exploration of the sources and investigating ways to implement these. He learned an especially low hold of the instrument through experimentation and research, which was used far later than many people assume, as well as the Geminiani hold placing the instrument under the collarbone. He tries to approach everything with an open mind, so it can be filled with interesting questions!
Trad meets Baroque is a concert concept and research topic. Starting as a personal exploration of the many similarities that I noticed between my baroque practice and traditional Irish music, it evolved into a research project completed at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam titled Trad meets Baroque concerts: Interpreting reciprocal influences from oral and written musical traditions in eighteenth century Irish performance practice, the results of which will be shared imminently.Oral and written traditions in Ireland are not simply oppositional forces, but complementary modes of musical thought and practice that have co-existed for centuries. Rather than framing the relationship between Irish traditional and Baroque music as one of cultural appropriation or dominance, Trad meets Baroque explores a more nuanced model of reciprocal influence and creative adaptation, combining the sources to form a cohesive performance style.Text
upcoming shows
Dublin HandelFest 2025:
Saturday August 16th, 19.30
Hibernia Conference Hall, Dublin Castle
[More information] (https://www.dublinhandelfest.com/tradmeetsbaroque)Cillian Ó Cathasaigh, violin
Tara Viscardi, Baroque Triple Harp
Director, Tadhg SudlowThe Library of Pádraig O Neill
Irish tunes neatly penned on the back of printed music published in Dublin, Irish language songs and poetry written next to books in Latin, Ancient Greek, English and French...
Pádraig Ó Néill’s library was a place of great knowledge and variety, a distinct point where Irish language met 18th century Europe. Now in the National Library, five books with traditional dance tunes and songs in Pádraig’s hand form the basis of this concert on historical instruments, alongside a taste of music from Dublin publishers on which these tunes were notated.
Pádraig’s manuscripts are the earliest known notations of traditional music from an Irish Gaelic person. Prior to this we have prints from Dublin publishers, often with unclear sources. He lived from 1765-1832 in Owning, Co. Kilkenny, and was a miller and a farmer, but also piper and fiddle player who sung and wrote Irish poetry. Join us for an exploration into the sounds of the beginning of the Irish music tradition as we know it today!