New Year’s Eve Extravaganza: Gatsby & Beyond

Guy Barker conductor
Vanessa Haynes, Joe Stilgoe, Tommy Blaize vocalists
Giacomo Smith, clarinet/saxophone
RTÉ Concert Orchestra 

Get your jazz hands at the ready and ring in 2024 with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under the extraordinary Guy Barker – 1920s dress-up encouraged!  

Just mention The Great Gatsby and the mind conjures up the glamour and flamboyance of the Jazz Age. In Gatsby & Beyond, RTÉ Concert Orchestra and its Associate Artist Guy Barker are joined by star singers Vanessa Haynes, Joe Stilgoe and Strictly Come Dancing’s Tommy Blaize, along with virtuoso Giacomo Smith on clarinet and sax. Together they’ll evoke the gloriously riotous world of Prohibition dance parties and the Roaring Twenties. There will be a special nod to the dance that took the decade by storm, the Charleston, created 100 years ago. And as well as ‘Gatsby’, get ready for the ‘& Beyond’ bit as they dive on into the musical treasures of 1930s, maybe even dipping a toe into the 1940s!  

Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman and Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan – they’re all here in an irresistible musical onslaught.

Guy Barker is steeped in this sound. A trumpet player who worked with the likes of Gil Evans, Quincy Jones, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr, Lena Horne and Liza Minnelli, and now one of the world’s most in-demand arrangers, he created the knockout orchestrations you’ll hear tonight from the RTÉ Concert Orchestra & Big Band.  

Also live on RTÉ lyric fm, presented by Paul Herriott.

The most stylish New Year’s Eve in town!