Concerto for Six - Tan Dun
String - Malachy Robinson
Girlfriend - Julia Wolfe
Passage Work - Raymond Deane
No 24, NONcerto for trombone - Richard Ayres
To Herbert Brⁿn - Donnacha Dennehy
The Crash Ensemble's last concert of its residency at the Project Arts Centre, the first to dispense with the acoustically-absorbent stage drapes, introduced Irish audiences to the music of Richard Ayres, the Netherlands-resident British composer.
Ayres, who's now in his mid-thirties, is working on an ongoing series of NONcertos . If the style of the one for alto trombone and ensemble presented by Crash is anything to go by, Ayres must be something of a jester in the world of new music.
Jesters, of course, need to be taken seriously, as their manner can be a way of dealing with matter that might otherwise prove intractable.
Ayres's often mute trombonist - here Roddy O'Keeffe - worries about having the right type of mute in his bell for notes he never plays, and frets with his eyes between music stand and conductor for cues that never materialise. He works his way through a gestural litany of performance quandaries while the other players in the small ensemble filter musical commonplaces through the aural equivalent of a video-wall. It may all seem light and amusing, but there's an astute intelligence at work here, with a keenly-theatrical gift for striking strong musical attitudes through the manipulation of apparently simple material.
Ayres's NONcerto is clearly a playful work. Julia Wolfe's slow Girlfriend, for ensemble and tape, seems to aim for poignancy. It opens with long-held notes over a background of distant, squealing tyres and noises of destruction, all slightly muted, as if heard, montage-like, from a TV in another room. The piece engages in a sort of atomic interchange, α la Flann O'Brien, leaving the musical lines tainted and agitated at the end.
Raymond Deane's Passage Work , for soprano, tape and ensemble, is the composer's first foray into the world of electronics. Its verbal content merges texts on the themes of "exile, dispossession, paths leading nowhere", and the work has moments of great emotional charge. But the effect is rather diluted with too much padding, like a political speech where the solidity of the message is compromised by the rhetorically-repetitive nature of the delivery and a failure to search beyond the obvious commonplaces of expression. The clichΘs of the electronic world have an even greater siren-like attraction than those of acoustic instruments. Soprano Sylvia O'Brien, standing in at short notice for the indisposed Judith Mok, sounded a tower of strength.
Donnacha Dennehy is someone with a declared affection for the most obvious of cultural commonplaces, the junk of modern urban life - he provided Moving Music, taped on Pearse Street as the introductory background for his To Herbert Brⁿn. There's no lack of synthesized explosiveness in this work for four performers and live electronics, but the general effect is, by Dennehy's standards, reflective, tinged with hints of aggressive anger and pain.
Tan Dun's Concerto for Six, which opened the concert, sounded like cheap ideas cornily implemented. Crash member Malachy Robinson's String came across as oddly vacuous.
