The weekend's Up North! festival of Nordic and Irish contemporary music featured a mix of style as well as quality. Michael Dervan braves the cold to sample boreal diversity
Looked at one way, the Up North! festival of Nordic and Irish music, which took place at the weekend, is a strange event for the beginning of the 21st century. National schools in contemporary music are probably harder for most listeners to identify than ever before. Style in composition is as international as style in performance, and wherever you go the message is that diversity rules. So a festival setting out to highlight the work of composers from one, let alone six countries, would nowdays be unlikely to achieve the sort of statement that might have been expected from a nationally focused festival at the beginning of the last century.
One of the ways that diversity has asserted itself has been through the attention given by composers to the mixed instrumental ensemble, and the groups playing at Up North! illustrated this to perfection. There was the Avanti! Ensemble from Finland, playing at Pierrot Lunaire strength of flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano (at its largest, Avanti! stretches to orchestra size), the Cikada String Quartet from Norway (an autonomous sub-set of a larger ensemble), Contemporánea from Denmark (clarinet, violin, double bass, percussion, electronic sound projection and video), the Rilke Ensemble from Sweden (a 12-member choir which stretches the boundaries of space and individual virtuosity in choral music), and four Irish groups, the Crash Ensemble (as hosts, they offered the largest range of formations), Concorde (an extension of the Pierrot formation), the Callino String Quartet (a string quartet, pure and simple), and Whispering Gallery (an electronic collective fielding five members, who collaborated with Norwegian guitarist and composer Øyvind Torvund).
Into this heady mix, the planners of Up North! added an extra collaborative element. All the works commissioned from Nordic composers were performed by Irish musicians, and vice versa - a total of 13 works were premièred at the festival, nine of them specially commissioned.
First honour in presenting a new work fell to the Crash Ensemble, premièring Kevin Volans's 1,000 bars for violin, cello and piano duet, a specialised line-up that I've only ever before encountered in a 19th-century arrangement of orchestral music for domestic use. With repeated string glissandos of unusual curve, and light peckings on the keyboard, Volans here created an utterly distinctive effect, a strange insect-like music - precisely calculated, it seemed, to suggest the contentment and fluctuating co-ordination that might arise from moderate consumption of alcohol. This was a quirky and consistently amusing piece, and the playing communicated it with meticulous care.
Crash rather let themselves down in Why linger you trembling in your shell? by the English composer Juliana Hodkinson, who's been based in Denmark since 1993. It's a micro-gestural work for violin and percussion, which makes much play with table-tennis balls. Unfortunately, the laughter prompted in one section of the audience was taken up by Crash percussionist Richard O'Donnell, who, like an actor stepping out of character, beamed a grinning response.
Crash's later full evening concert showed a significant drop in the concentrated energy and sharpness that characterised the group's work in its earliest days. Only in parts of the closing work, Magnus Lindberg's UR, was there any real suggestion of the spark that made so many of their performances special in the past.
Concorde didn't undertake as taxing a programme as Crash, and they delivered more consistent results, with confident singing from soprano Tine Verbeke, a tower of strength in Dermot Dunne as accordionist (in Finnish composer Jarmo Sermilä's Ego 2) and conductor, and predictable flashes of genius from guest bass clarinettist, Harry Sparnaay (most impressively in Swedish composer Klas Torstensson's cogent but dated Spans).
Concorde, of course, had the benefit of playing in the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, not the most acoustically illuminating of venues, but a haven of ease by comparison with the unpleasant dryness of Project's Space Upstairs.
Contemporánea's trendy mix of video and music - replete with audio-visual garbage to fill the gap the moment the actual music had ended - might seem to be ideally suited to bring character to such a characterless space. It wasn't to be. I found the style pretentious, and even the new work by Donnacha Dennehy, Glamour Sleeper, seemed, with its punctuated thumping, to mine an old area without finding any new ore. The Avanti! Ensemble, working without the contribution of heavy amplification, suffered rather more obviously from the venue's acoustic shortcomings.
Happily, not everything was consigned to Project. The Callino Quartet gave a lunchtime programme that included a new quartet by Finland's Kimmo Hakola. This work is expressionist in manner, with claustrophobic outer movements like an intense conversation between people who insist on talking over each other; the short central scherzo sounds, by comparison, slightly silly. Ian Wilson's Sixth Quartet, In fretta, in vento, shows an undisguised romanticism which hovers between nostalgia and an altogether more frank suggestion of re-living the past before the mood is cast aside and undermined by keening slides and a final ghostly chorale, delivered with fragmenting string tone. The Callinos are not contemporary music specialists, but on the evidence of their Up North! appearance they could with confidence choose to be.
The Rilke Ensemble, performing in the Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle, presented sometimes playful, often challenging repertoire, in which two pieces stood out. Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist's Davids Nimm, now nearly 20 years old, conjures up new worlds by treating its text backwards. And Jennifer Walshe's new been in a room and a room and a room and a room explores not just what you might call disallowed sounds, but disapproved modes of behaviour. She uses techniques that were investigated for their sonic and shock value in the 1950s and 1960s, but her interest is rather different. There's often an aura of mental disturbance in performances that manage - as this one did - to get to the heart of her work for voice.
Many people probably wondered if Dublin had an audience for as much unfamiliar music as Up North! chose to offer in just four days. Around 50 pieces by 40 composers were represented - their age averaged out at 45, with Jennifer Walshe at 28 the youngest.
But everything was actually well attended, and, although not a great deal of what was heard was very memorable, the various official Nordic representatives present seem to have been more than content with the success of this ground-breaking event. I think it's fair to expect that the networking that went on will open up routes to further traffic between Irish and Nordic music and musicians in the years ahead.
