Sunday, August 12, 2012

Christine Tobin - Sailing to Byzantium (Trail Belle Records 2012)

The new CD "Sailing To Byzantium" (release date July 2012) includes special guest, renowned actor Gabriel Byrne reading three of the poems. Byrne’s presence on the album is of special significance to Christine as he was her teacher back in Dublin when she attended secondary school. Gabriel was the school’s Spanish teacher, but he also led drama classes after hours for students who showed a keen interest. His collaboration with Tobin on this recording follows a direct link to an inspirational time in her formative years when she attended, what was then, one of Dublin’s most unique schools. Yeats’s poems came into her life around this time too, when her first boyfriend used to read her When You Are Old, and a moonstruck Tobin imagined “the pilgrim soul” lay somewhere within. Christine Tobin website