Having grown up on a working farm, Fiachra Garvey was studying to be a vet. But a pivotal moment drove him to music. Now he’s one of Ireland’s few concert pianists and the driving force behind the West Wicklow Chamber Music Festival
Fiachra Garvey.
For someone who spends his days touring Europe’s great concert halls, pianist Fiachra Garvey still keeps remarkably close to the rhythms of rural life.
“I still feel I have a vet’s lifestyle,” he says — and it’s not hard to see why. Only hours after performing in Limerick, he was back home in Ballyknockan, hair‑drying a hypothermic lamb in the kitchen at four in the morning. It’s an unexpected image of one of Ireland’s few full‑time classical pianists, a musician whose career might never have happened at all were it not for a near‑fatal car crash that pushed him to choose the piano over veterinary science.