Reviewed today are Sligo New Music Festival, Lambchop at The Gaiety, Dublin, Vramsmo Smith at the Law Society, Blackhall Place, Dublin and Snow Patrol at the Ambassador
Sligo New Music Festival
Michael Dervan
Rebecca Saunders, featured composer of the Sligo New Music Festival, has spent her working life in Berlin. In conversation with the festival's artistic director Ian Wilson she pondered the importance of living in Germany, saying, "I think I wouldn't have written music if I hadn't moved to Germany," a fact she explained through the freedom she experienced in the early years of living "in a culture that was so foreign".
In her music this freedom is found in an exploratory approach to sound, extending liberally into non-orthodox areas, and a wide-ranging absorption in the physicality of sound production. She's also interested in the connectedness of sounds, of the possibilities of timbres and colours on one instrument seeming to disappear into, or emerge out of, notes on another.
Her repertoire of gesture seems almost like a rehabilitation of the ground first colonised by the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s, with extremes of dynamic and register, and even the slamming shut of the keyboard fall on a piano. Molly's Song 3, inspired by Molly Bloom's soliloquy, adds four radios and a music box to its complement of alto flute, viola and steel-stringed guitar.
The Sligo programmes of the visiting German ensemble musikFabrik offered five of Saunders's works, the Duo for violin and piano, the piano solo from insideout, Molly's Song 3, the underside of green, and vermilion. Saunders describes herself as being interested in seeing how far particular sounds can be pushed, and in this regard her works could be viewed as being akin to the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, but with avant-garde gestures replacing the gypsy melodies. Her music is as theatrical and physical, as insistent and as meditative as Liszt can be. And in the authoritative performances by musikFabrik it came across with a strange but compelling narrative cogency.
Saturday's concerts offered a rich complex of cross-references.
Aggression and insistence was put to altogether different expressive purposes in Saunders's solo, the pounding intensity of Galina Ustvolskaya's Sixth Sonata, Helmut Lachenmann's Kinderspiel for solo piano, (this latter from the late night recital by Isabelle O'Connell).
O'Connell included a disappointingly soft-edged performance of Pierre Boulez's Third Sonata, which takes an interest in what can be done with piano sound after the notes are played, something which Lachenmann explores with étude-like thoroughness in his Serynade. The Boulez was not receiving the Irish première Ian Wilson claimed. As a student in the 1970s, I heard it performed in Dublin at least twice.
There was just one world première during the day, converging springtime lawns by Eunan McCreesh, head of music at St Catherine's College for Girls in Armagh. In O'Connell's hands, the contrasts of calm and aggression in this piece, inspired by depictions of Christ's agony in the garden and dedicated to the memory of McCreesh's friend and colleague, the footballer Cormac McAnallen, sounded conventionally constrained by comparison with the sharper bite of the company it was keeping.
Lambchop
The Gaiety, Dublin
Tony Clayton-Lea
First they were alt.country/lounge-jazz. Then they were Countrypolitan. Then they were heavy-lidded alt.miserypop. And then they went really weird. More recently Lambchop are a mixture of each of the aforementioned, with perhaps an emphasis on the weird. Yet in their terms, weird doesn't necessarily mean inaccessible, which is why for the most part this gig was awash with the kind of melodies that drift in and out of your head - the way memories do, except with an accompanying, rather strange and gorgeous soundtrack.
Kurt Wagner is the figurative and enigmatic leader of Lambchop, a musician's collective based in Nashville. He cuts a curious figure on stage, seated during the entirety of the performance, playing guitar, his head protected from the glare of the stage lights by a baseball cap. He fronts the eight-piece band in an avuncular, laconic fashion, allowing them their leads while all the time threatening to reign in any one of the more extravagant musicians. During moments of improvisation, however - where various musics blend and bend into the same shape - Wagner seems as surprised at the outcome as the audience. The special magic of Lambchop is contained within such loosely themed, intricate songs.
Yet their multi-layered music is an acquired taste. Crudely put, they are the Nashville equivalent of a particularly good prog rock band: a contradictory, technically expert melange of sublime tunes, tricky time changes and abstract, pun-laden lyrics - more often than not within the same song. Unlike even the best of prog rock bands, however, Lambchop never come across as unwieldy or too clever for their own good.
They have a sense of humour, too, on this, the final date of their European tour; jokes are flung around at everyone's expense; the giddy goof-off factor is high. Throughout, however, is a strict sense of commitment to the common cause of making superb music. With downright weird making its exit stage left - replaced, unsurprisingly, by a singular strain of musical individuality that's as much Wagner's as the musicians' - it looks as if Lambchop plan to stick around for some time to come.
Vramsmo Smith
Law Society, Blackhall Place, Dublin
Michael Dungan
Schumann - Four Songs; Dichterliebe.
Stenhammar - Three Songs.
Strauss - Mädchenblumen.
Boydell - Five Joyce Songs
The young Swedish baritone Hakan Vramsmo has a talent for easing his audience through the song recital's counterpart to the willing suspension of disbelief at a play.
He revealed this talent in settings of Heinrich Heine by Schumann at a presentation of the Association of Music Lovers (formerly the Limerick Music Association) whose weekend mini-festival the concert closed.
Heine's romantic poetry is so much a product of the 19th century - with its direct emotional appeal, fragile heroes, and the blooming of Nature as an allegory for love - that an aesthetic leap is required of the modern audience. Vramsmo reduced this leap to a mere step. In the 16 love-songs of Schumann's Dichterliebe, and in four further settings of Heine from Opp. 142 and 127, the singer unveiled an irresistible, persuasive power, fuelled as much by his own whole-hearted engagement with the songs as by the brightness and flexibility of his voice.
Much less of a leap is required by Strauss's four Mädchenblumen songs. Based on poems by Felix Dahn, they seem more contemporary, assigning different flowers to four entirely recognisable female archetypes.
Here the piano - played with sensitivity and understanding throughout by Andrew Smith - provided beautiful detail: the intertwining strands of ivy ("born to climb lovingly around another life"), the shimmering, moonlit translucence of waterlilies.
Vramsmo also included songs by his compatriot Wilhelm Stenhammar, their texts folk-based, the music full of Lisztian late romanticism.
He closed with Five Joyce Songs by the late Brian Boydell. They are from 1946 and contain an English pastoral influence which would fade in the 1950s. Vramsmo gave an illuminating account, ranging in mood from the gentle "Strings in the earth and air" to the dark declamation of "I hear an army charging upon the land".
Snow Patrol
Ambassador
Kevin Courtney
It must have been a great homecoming party. Gary Lightbody, leader of Snow Patrol, has a sore throat from Friday night's triumphant gig in Belfast, but he's still got some larynx left for the devoted Dublin crowd. After a few years' trudging steadily through the alt.rock tundra, Snow Patrol suddenly find themselves at the centre of a blizzard.
Their current album, Final Straw is a big indie hit, the single, Run, went to the top five in the UK, and it looks as if even the US will fall to the charms of this Northern Irish/Scots outfit. Parallels are being drawn with Coldplay, but as Saturday's gig in Dublin showed, Snow Patrol are ploughing their own quirky path.
Lightbody is such an affable presence on stage, with his boyish haircut, jeans, sneakers and T-Shirt, that you can practically picture a younger Chris Martin, but when he sings, his voice speaks of a different style of sincerity.
He can be wry, as on How To Be Dead, or empathetic, as on One Night Is Not Enough. Thankfully, he doesn't over-emote, and even though Run is ostensibly an earnest anthem in the style of Yellow, onstage it is cloaked in dark, claustrophobic colours before emerging butterfly-like into a full-flight chorus. Lightbody must also have a sore jaw from grinning, and here he is smiling broadly in surprise as the crowd sings the final chorus back to him.
In the face of fame, Snow Patrol could easily have bowed their heads and continued shovelling away. Instead, they rise to the challenge posed by sudden success, and push hard to lift the gig above the everyday. Current single Chocolate pounds in a Doves kind of way, not quite breaking through, but Ways and Means brings things to another level, and allows the five-piece band to show its wider musical palette. Songs from their earlier albums, Songs From Polar Bears and When It's All Over We Still Have To Clean Up, including Ask Me How I Am and Starfighter Pilot, nicely counterpoint the more radio-friendly fare from Final Straw, while the closer, Spitting Games, is reassuringly unpolished. Welcome to the bigtime, lads - enjoy it.
