Irish Times writers visit the East Cork Early Music Festival and the O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin.
Maya Homburger (violin), Camerata Kilkenny
East Cork Early Music Festival
By Michael Dervan
We know what pleasure Mozart took in exploring new instrumental possibilities, especially through the low register of the clarinet, which underwent important developments in the instruments of his time. And Beethoven was quick to exploit the extra higher and lower notes that were added to the range of pianos in the early decades of the 19th century.
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1704-44) was a great virtuoso of the violin. As a composer, his best-known works are a set of violin sonatas, known as the Rosary or Mystery Sonatas, with each one named after a decade of the Rosary.
And in these works Biber created a range of highly distinctive sonorities through the use of the technique known as scordatura.
Scordatura involves re-tuning the strings of the violin, which both changes the resonant character of the instrument (it's the open strings which speak with greatest resonance) and also enables the sounding of otherwise impossible or impossibly awkward combinations of notes when chords are played through double-stopping.
The range of tunings involved is so elaborate as to require multiple instruments for concert performances, and, to the best of my knowledge, seven sonatas using four different violins is as many as baroque violinist Maya Homburger has ever dared undertake in a single programme. The music is rich in symbolic connections. Some stem from associations which are purely musical. Others greet the eye when the music is read - the Crucifixion Sonata opens with a motif that outlines a cross.
And there's even a major one with an altogether firmer physical reality.
For the Resurrection Sonata the middle strings of the violin are physically crossed at either end of the instrument (in the pegbox and beyond the bridge), and the combination of crossing and retuning also facilitates the playing of octaves in a manner that's unique in the literature of the violin.
All this background would, of course, be of little interest if the music was not of high quality.
Fortunately, Biber's musical inspiration was of a level to match the intricacy of his technical imagination. And the sonatas require a performer of exceptional gifts to speak with clarity and conviction to a modern audience.
Maya Homburger, who presented what must surely have been the first all-Biber programme in Ireland during Kilkenny Arts Week in 1998, repeated the feat at St John the Baptist Church in Midleton for the East Cork Early Music Festival on Thursday, to mark the 300th anniversary of the composer's death.
Homburger has a sure grasp of Biber's musical logic, an alert sensitivity to the extraordinary sound worlds he created, and she seems finely attuned to the deeper suggestiveness of the music, a suggestiveness which is, above all, what makes these pieces so treasurable.
Whether dealing with the overt lament which opens The Agony in the Garden, the sense of subterranean disturbance that's to be found later in that same sonata, or the many flashes of finger-blurring virtuosity that are littered throughout these works, her musicianship always seemed true, her communication free and open.
The accompanying continuo group, Siobhán Armstrong (double harp), Malcolm Proud (organ and harpsichord), and Sarah Cunningham (viola da gamba), rang the changes with imagination and matched the soloist in bringing these extraordinary works fully to life.
Tony MacMahon, Kronos String Quartet
O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin
By Martin Adams
The Kronos String Quartet are star performers. All 11 items on the programme, the second of two given in Dublin, were written or arranged for them, and it was with music from Mexico and Ireland that the concert opened and closed.
The arrangements by Osvaldo Golljov and Stephen Prutsman, of Mexican popular music, showed that the priority is the raw energy of the originals.
The Irish arrangements by Tony MacMahon and Stephen Prutsman reflected the same priority. These rejig the panache of a high-class session: the tunes speak out in a natural way, yet their rhetoric is reinforced by the string instruments.
Here, MacMahon joined the Kronos, and proved himself a king among accordion players, who can make the instrument keen like the most expressive voice, or knock out a rousing march like a percussion-filled military band.
The original compositions included three American works.
Children's Hour of Dream is arranged by Sy Johnson from Charles Mingus's huge Epitaph, and the suite Requiem for a Dream by David Lang from Clint Mansell's film score. Dream is the operative word, for these pieces reach out in a soft-centred way.
The contrast with the other American work, Michael Gordon's Potassium was striking. It's a fascinating piece, based mainly on various ways of playing glissandos that often don't, and occasionally do, reach the goal they seem to aim for.
The other original work that came across as strong was Kevin Volan's recently completed String Quartet No 8 (Black Woman Rising).
Inspired by developments in his native South Africa, it is one of those works that gets a lot out of material that can be distilled down to very little. That, plus its retrospective references to Volan's earlier music, make it an absorbing piece from a composer who knows exactly what he is doing.
