The young Dublin composer, Andrew Hamilton, obviously has a black sense of humour. His jokey counting piece was all in Irish, which left most of his listeners completely in the dark - and his enigmatic programme note didn't help either. Sadly, this was part of an otherwise offensive and ear-damagingly loud late-night concert in a nightclub where the regular business intruded its bass thump into the performances.
A Belfast composer, Deirdre Gribbin, also had a new work in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, The Celestial Pied Piper, played by the Composers' Ensemble. It reflects its cometary inspiration in music of splintering energy and pseudo-minimalist calm. Her According 2 programme, heard at the John Field Room in the NCH's Composers' Choice series last spring and featuring the work of Dermot Dunne and clarinettist Paul Roe, got a nightclub-atmosphere repeat in a late-night slot.
Meanwhile, Dublin soundsculptor Derek Shiels's work pleased the eye rather more than it rewarded the ear.
The major focus at the festival this year, however, was on German music. The work of three men born before, during and after the decade of the second World War was showcased.
The youngest, Wolfgang Rihm (born 1952), is probably the best known, both at home and abroad, as he's one of the small number of contemporary composers to have been taken up and commissioned by the violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter. The oldest, Helmut Lachenmann (born 1935), is of the same generation as Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part and Steve Reich. But, unlike them, he's a true child of the 1950s - his own description - and has never lost faith in exploratory paths that were opened up by the serialists of the post-war years.
York Holler (born 1944) is a bridging figure in many ways. He's long been concerned with marrying the worlds of electronic media and live performance, he's a German who's got strong associations with things French, and his work manages to satisfy tastes both avantgarde and traditionalist.
All three men were in Huddersfield, giving talks and workshops. Lachenmann and Holler did solo stints, and Lachenmann surfaced also as a foil to Rihm, with festival director Richard Steinitz acting as interlocutor. Rihm is perhaps the easiest to place, as a one-time young tiger who upset the avant-garde apple-cart in the 1970s.
Quotations from, allusions to and evocations of the music of the past are an important component of his frequently flamboyant style. Schumann is a particular obsession, haunting both the songs of the Wolfli Liederbuch and the extended, visceral frenzy of Jagden und Formen, a modernday Lisztian indulgence for ensemble rather than soloist.
Rihm is highly prolific, and has a Boulez-like propensity for revisiting his own work, leaving trails of pieces, like a diary that can be read with or without insertions and amendments. Lachenmann is an altogether cooler character, whose early studies with Luigi Nono were, as he put it, like an inquisition. This seems to have been a temporarily paralysing experience, about which Lachenmann harbours surprisingly little resentment. It's left him with a desire to purify his material, to "empty" it of associations, and this, in turn, has led to a never-ending exploration of the means of sound production.
The 1970 piano piece Guero, for instance, has the pianist producing the minute sounds that can be achieved by running fingernails over the tops of the keys, or by plucking at the keys themselves. The piano concerto, Ausklang, attempts to reconsider the orchestra as a resource through which to recreate characteristics of the sound-world of the piano. The BBC Symphony Orchestra's handling of this mesmerisingly complex undertaking - conducted by Jaco van Steen, with Ueli Wiget as soloist - won a greater cheer from the audience than the Wagnerian certainties of gesture in Rihm's Vers une Symphonie Fleuve IV.
Other large-scale events included the town band of Ruvo di Puglia, sounding like a stage full of David Helfgotts in their operatic arrangements, but quite transformed in the collaborations with jazz soloists which made up the second half of their concert. The Latvian Radio Choir sang as one sometimes feels only choirs from Eastern Europe can, and, in an intriguing workshop, offered explanations for all their particular skills and achievements that boiled down to just a single common factor: commonsense.
The Nieuw Ensemble from Amsterdam presented a tribute to Pierre Boulez, who celebrated his 75th birthday earlier this year. Boulez's work, fastidious in texture and timbre, has taken what you might call the equalising forces of early serialism and dealt with them in a way that glories in the detail of the moment. The 40-minute Sur in- cises, for three each of pianos, harps and percussion (completed in 1998, and based on an earlier short piano piece) is like a tangled stream of mirrored strands. By one of the sharpest ears around, it is calculated to beguile.
Opera was represented by the London Sinfonietta's touring production of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek. This musical version of Oedipus via Steven Berkoff is immediate and raw, and Clare Venables's direction makes excellent use of Conor Murphy's strictly front-of-stage set.
Michael Berkeley's prosaic Jane Eyre, meanwhile, was deeply disappointing, in spite of the visual appeal of Richard Aylwin's curved, reflective set for the Music Theatre Wales production.
The finest of the operatic offerings was Kopernikus, written in 1979 by Canada's Claude Vivier, who was tragically murdered in Paris four years later at the age of 35. The libretto is a strange mixture of mysticism and naivety. The central asexual character, Agni, meets or imagines meetings with the likes of Merlin, Tristan, Isolde and Mozart. There's a lot of philosophising, which is as likely to repel as to appeal, but the music, heavily flavoured by the Stockhausen of the 1970s (with whom Vivier studied), creates a cogent, cocooning world. Toronto's Autumn Leaf company offers a hypnotically simple, ritualised performance of a rare musical perfection.
Vivier seems to be in the process of being elevated to cult status. This production clarifies the reasons why.
One of the strangest of operarelated pieces was Brian Ferneyhough's Opus Contra Naturam, a work for voice and piano which forms part of his opera project, Shadowtime. It shows hints of a sense of humour not often seen in the output of this high priest of complexity. The work gets its Irish premiere, again from Ian Pace, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre next Thursday.
A sense of humour was to the fore in Chris Newman's Burning Note Rows, a wicked play based on the idea of formulaic repetition, the text spoken with appropriate deadpan weariness by Andrew Toovey. There is a blown-up, comic-book bluntness in Toovey's own White Fire II which brings to mind those on-screen captions in the Batman TV series. Quite how earnest Toovey was about this effect wasn't easy to work out.
The British premiere of Gyorgy Ligeti's new With Pipes, Drums and Fiddles, performed by mezzosoprano Katalin Karolyi and the Amadinda Percussion Ensemble showed that the Hungarian master has lost nothing of his edge, wit and imagination as he heads towards his 78th birthday. Who else would think of setting a text for percussion ensemble with four harmonicas or three ocarinas?
