The RTÉ Living Music Festival this year took jazz on board for the first time - what was the result? Michael Dervanand Ray Comiskeyassess the musical performances.
John Adams, who celebrated his 60th birthday last Thursday, has for nearly a quarter of a century been turning heads inside and outside the musical world with a series of operas on contemporary subjects, and a string of works that orchestral managements are more than happy to programme.
His music has achieved the kind popularity that so signally eluded the avant-garde generation he rebelled against as a young man. And although he feels that orchestral life is destined to become a museum culture, it's as a composer of orchestral music that he has achieved the greatest acclaim.
The best of Adams that was on offer in last weekend's RTÉ Living Music Festival came in the opening and closing concerts at the National Concert Hall. The hall's acoustic is not kind to Adams's sometimes frenetic writing. The brightness and lack of body in the sound also take something of the inner life out of the orchestral writing, and the first two works in Friday's opening programme from the RTÉ NSO under Pierre-André Valade seemed to suffer most in this regard.
Lollapalooza (Adams gets an A-plus for memorable titles), a 40th birthday present for Simon Rattle in 1995, is, in the composer's description, a "dancing behemoth". Its grunting riffs sounded a little stiff on Friday, formally correct rather than internally sprung.
Century Rolls, a 1996 piano concerto for Emanuel Ax, spends much time in motoric toccata mode, and was played with fluid, well-oiled fingerwork by Rolf Hind. But there was a lack of textural variety in the performance which allowed a certain monotony to creep in.
The 40-minute Harmonielehre of 1985 (the title borrowed from a harmony textbook by one of Adams's bogeymen, Arnold Schoenberg) was a key work in reconnecting the world of minimalism with a wealth of pre-minimalist musical concerns.
As the composer himself put it, "The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece." Valade and the NSO players found an altogether sharper sonic focus and a greater charge of energy in this work. The necessary sense of exoticism was achieved for the emergence of long-breathed, sinuous romantic melodies with luscious harmonic underpinning, and the players rode the pulsating movement as if driven by a tail-wind, steering a clear and knowing course through the myriad references.
The London Sinfonietta under Brad Lubman opened Sunday's closing programme with Michael Gordon's ACDC, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, a piece which, like a kind of musical paint-gun, sprays fiddly, flecked texture around a straightforward-seeming, foot-tapping riff.
Mark van de Wiel gave a persuasively feisty account of the often droll 1996 clarinet concerto, Gnarly Buttons, a work which comes complete with sampled cow moo in the second movement. Another piece from 1996, Scratchband, aims to marry characteristics of rock band punch and new music ensemble adventure, but falls uncomfortably between two stools. The brightness of the acoustic resulted in a combination of haze and glare in the 1992 Chamber Symphony, a work of zany, intentionally cartoonish knockabout, which is one of Adams's best pieces.
Adams has spoken self-deprecatingly about his small output of chamber music, saying, "it just didn't appear to me to be my forte in the way that for example Carter is a really great chamber music composer, or Bartók, or Beethoven".
It was strange, then, for a festival which included no live performance from any of the operas, no vocal music whatsoever, and not a single piece written after 1996, to include virtually all the chamber music.
The performances, sadly, were not of the best. The Crash Ensemble outdid themselves in grotesque amplification of the early Shaker Loops (1978), and failed to find an appropriate clarity in Hallelujah Junction (1996) for two pianos. Crash sounded at their best in Kevin Volans's new Joining Up the Dots for two pianos and strings, a piece which suggests a time-stretched exploration of chordal material, exposing unexpected cracks and shimmers, like a microscopically close-up photograph of a piece of rock.
UNRELIABLE INTONATION MARRED Michael d'Arcy and Izumi Kimura's performance of Road Movies (1995) for violin and piano, and the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet sounded quite off the mark in John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994) for string quartet and CD. The composer describes the tone of this piece as "dry, droll, sardonic", and it would seem that the members of the RTÉVQ really don't do dry, droll and sardonic.
The players, however, are to be congratulated for keeping the show on the road. Their opening performance, of Bartók's Fourth Quartet, is one for the record books, as second violinist Keith Pascoe not only broke a string in the pizzicato movement, but damaged the violin's bridge as well, necessitating a long delay while a replacement instrument was found. This must surely make the Vanbrugh's performance of the Bartók from start to finish one of the longest ever.
The festival programme was as much devoted to jazz as to Adams, a gesture which seemed to be a combination of straightforward self-indulgence by artistic director, Ronan Guilfoyle, and wishful thinking crossover marketing ploy.
Two programmes brought both strands explicitly together. Ed Neumeister's Suite for Piano Quartet and Improvising Soloist (himself on trombone) sounded like a grotesquely unworkable forced marriage. But the juxtaposition of Rolf Hind (in Ligeti's Études for piano) and a set from the flighty and tonally resourceful Russian jazz pianist Simon Nabatov showed interesting points of connection and contrast. Connection and contrast should be on the agenda next year, too, when Scottish composer James MacMillian will direct a festival focusing on the work of Estonian Arvo Pärt.
