BANBHA QUARTET
Lidia Jewloszewicz-Clarke, violin
Maria Ryan, violin
Robin Panter, viola
Peggy Nolan, cello
The Banbha Quartet was founded in 2020 and is made up of four of our most celebrated musicians. They return for their fifth tour for the National String Quartet Foundation in autumn 2025
Lidia Jewloszewicz-Clarke, violin
Lidia Jewloszewicz-Clarke is an award-winning Polish violinist living in Ireland. She is a winner of the Hibernian Orchestra Concerto Competition (Ireland) and the Gdańsk Mozart Prize (Poland). She was a founding member of the Lupus Piano Trio, with whom she received the Special Prize at the International Brahms Competition in Gdańsk, and was a finalist of the Bacewicz International Chamber Music Competition in Łódź. Lidia is the recipient of a scholarship from the President of the University of Music in Luzern, Switzerland and an Artistic Scholarship from the President of Gdańsk for Special Achievements in Music and Culture. Most recently, Lidia was awarded an Agility Award and a bursary by The Arts Council in Ireland.
Lidia regularly performs with Camerata Ireland, Musici Ireland, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra. Lidia graduated with honours from the Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk. She furthered her studies in London at The Royal Academy of Music and graduated with an MA in Performance. Her teachers included Remus Azoiței, Sebastian Hamann, Tomotada Soh and Mirosława Pawlak.
Maria Ryan, violin
A native of Kilkenny, award-winning violinist Maria Ryan is a member of the Banbha Quartet, the newly-founded Marble Collective and performs in duo partnership with Dr. Gabriela Mayer. She also recently performed with the Prizm Trio as part of Cork Orchestral Society’s concert season.
In 2010, Maria moved to London to join Southbank Sinfonia; there she was awarded the position of Leader and chosen to perform in their chamber music showcase at Wigmore Hall. Over the following ten years, Maria worked with some of the UK's most prestigious orchestras, including the BBC Concert and Symphony Orchestras, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra. She recently undertook a Music Network Residency at St. John’s Arts Centre, Listowel with the Marble Collective.
Maria is a recipient of the RDS Music Bursary and winner of the Heineken Violin Competition. She was awarded an Agility Award by The Arts Council in 2021. She studied at the CIT Cork School of Music with Ruxandra Petcu-Colan and subsequently at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne with Emilian Piedicuta.
Maria moved back to Kilkenny in 2019 to live on a farm in the countryside with her two children. She works regularly with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, Irish National Opera, Camerata Ireland and is a Lecturer at the MTU Cork School of Music.
Robin Panter, viola
Robin Panter is from Liverpool and studied the viola at the Royal Northern College of Music with Roger Benedict and Scott Dickinson. Robin joined the viola section of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2004, and while in Glasgow teamed up with a group of musicians to set up the Scottish version of El Sistema, visiting Venezuela and applying its ground-breaking social and community development programme to schools in Raploch, Stirling.
Robin now lives in Ireland where he is a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra and performs with the RTÉ Concert, National Symphony and Ulster Orchestras. Robin is a keen chamber musician and is a member of the Robinson Panoramic Quartet, and more recently Trio Táin with his wife Vourneen Ryan (Flute) and Aisling Ennis (Harp). Robin is a trained Suzuki violin teacher and teaches the viola at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.
Peggy Nolan, cello
Peggy enjoys a varied performance career playing with ensembles of all shapes and sizes. As cellist of the Eblana String Trio she has performed in widely since 2006 across the UK, Ireland and further afield. In 2021 the trio released their album, ‘The King’s Alchemist’ to critical acclaim. The album was selected as chamber CD of month in a 5-star review in BBC music magazine and praised for its “splendidly stylish and affectionate performance” (Gramophone). Their second album of string trios by William Alwyn, JB McEwen and Gordon Jacob will be released in 2025.
Peggy is a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, and frequently performs with other ensembles including Manchester Collective and Royal Northern Sinfonia. She can frequently be heard in collaboration with a diverse array of musicians, including recent performances at the Edinburgh International, Cheltenham, Órtús and Killaloe Chamber Music and Celtic Connections Festivals. Peggy is also the cellist of Amika, a string quartet who fuse the craft of chamber music with contemporary techniques and approaches. Amika have collaborated with Jordan Rakei, Rob Luft, Alice Zawadzki, Natalie Williams and Tom Walker, with live performances bringing them to the Manchester, London, and Cambridge Jazz festivals, as well as broadcasts from BBC Maida Vale, Abbey Road and Metropolis Studios and a full-length album Recurring (Live at Kings Place) with Alfa Mist.
Teaching is an important strand of Peggy’s work, and she holds cello tutor positions at both the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Royal Irish Academy of Music. In addition, she teaches for Arco, a distance-learning project in collaboration which provides string teaching to students in South Africa and India. Peggy is the Course Director of ConCorda Chamber music course, and is studying for a PhD in Performance at the Royal Northern College of Music, researching Boccherinian performance practice and creating new recordings and editions of Boccherini’s little- known op.24 and 44 string quartets.