The £1,500 top prize at the King House Piano Awards was won by 21-year-old Ruth McGinley, with the second and third prizes going to Laura Sanchez Martin and Owen Lorigan writes Michael Dervan. All three players are students of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The junior (under-17) prize at the Co Roscommon competition went to an 11-year-old from Cork, Kirsten Cap, daughter of Jan Cap, pianist of the Crawford Trio and head of keyboard at the Cork School of Music. The pianists, 20-year-old Finghin Collins, beat 12 colleagues from around the world to take Le Prix Animato in Paris. Part of his prize includes an appearance at the Salle Cortot in Paris and a tour of other French cities.

Irish composer Gerald Barry has a number of concerts coming up in Europe in the next few months. Next week, on March 23rd and 24th, his String Quartet and 2nd Piano Quartet will be performed by the Xenia Ensemble in Turin and Milan, with Barry himself at the piano. The work will be recorded in Turin on the 25th, and will be released on the Black Box label in the autumn. His first Piano Quartet, which is on the Leaving Certificate course, is selling fast on the NMC label.

On May 29th, Barry's new orchestral piece, The Road, commissioned by German Radio for the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, will be performed in Frankfurt, and in November, the prestigious Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will perform his piece for voice and orchestra based on the 11th-century Giraldus Cambrensis manuscript, The Conquest of Ireland, which was originally commissioned by the BBC.