Reviewed: Morgan, NCC, RTÉ NSO/Maloney, NCH, Dublinand Shock Waves/NME Awards Tour at the Ambassador
Morgan, NCC, RTÉ NSO/Maloney
NCH, Dublin
David Lang - Grind to a Halt. Donnacha Dennehy - Elastic Harmonic. HIVE.
It's easy to understand how and why contemporary composers might feel a little uneasy in dealing with the full forces of a symphony orchestra.
There's the issue of symphony concerts as a kind of museum culture. There have been notorious instances of players digging their heels in about composers' novel demands. And there's the fact that the cutting edge in musical life has long moved away from orchestras towards much smaller ensembles with a greater readiness to take risks on behalf of composers.
Donnacha Dennehy, the multimedia guru of the Crash Ensemble, still seems to experience a certain ambivalence about writing for full orchestra. His description of his favoured solution, to treat the orchestra as a very large ensemble, has something of the air of Mahler about it. Mahler's scoring is often light enough to present the orchestra as a kind of magically chameleon-like chamber ensemble, more varied in its colouristic resources than any genuine chamber ensemble could ever be.
Dennehy's approach sounds altogether different. It's as if in treating the orchestra as a supersize ensemble he has chosen to ignore the weights and densities of lines played by multiple instruments. He's on record as liking dirty sounds, and his orchestral writing has something of a certain natural wildness about it: heavy undergrowth, a murky middle ground, and an elaborate canopy.
Elastic Harmonic, for amplified violin and orchestra, sets itself decidedly against the traditional oppositional dynamic of a violin concerto. The balances between soloist and orchestra do shift, but more in the manner of the fluctuating colours of foliage in a breeze than in the sharply delineated give and take of concerto conventions.
The main concern in the writing appears to be textural, the patterns calculated not only for their combinations in conventional terms, but also, in spectralist fashion, for the interactions and illusions of their meshing overtones.
HIVE, for choir and orchestra, interestingly juxtaposes texts from Byron's Don Juan and some rather Hibernophobic descriptions of the Irish abroad from Thomas Beames's The Rookeries of London. It also divides the orchestra into sections that are tuned a quarter-tone apart, another ruse for providing the dirty finish that Dennehy is so fond of.
Gavin Maloney's confident performances of both pieces in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's Horizons series may have allowed the pieces to sound too full of detail for their own good. This is music that runs the risk cluttering the soundspace, and clutter it did, with Darragh Morgan, the committed soloist in Elastic Harmonic, seeming to spend too much time, as it were, below the surface.
Dennehy is essaying a kind of writing that, whatever its hold on its composer, must grip its listeners by means of some potency of mood, gesture or colouring. Otherwise it is likely to remain, like bi-tonality when that was a fashionable undertaking, a case of technical exploration for its own sake. The best moments in these performances came in the lighter passages of HIVE, when the vertiginous microtonal clashes were heard to best effect.
Los Angeles-born David Lang's Grind to a Halt showed more arresting qualities than Dennehy's work, creating a stronger immediate impact, and functioning as a kind of strangely mesmerising, grotesquely entropic ticking mechanism that periodically prolonged itself through unexpected surges of energy. - Michael Dervan
Shock Waves/
NME Awards Tour
Ambassador
What's that coming over the hill . . . oh, it's just another bunch of hotly-tipped, over-hyped British bands, armed with next-big-thing notices from the pages of the NME, and arriving on our shores with more baggage than Kate Winslet on the Titanic. Four happening bands in one night - sounds like a good opportunity to check if the UK music scene still has a pulse.
We've got the View, indie guitar jangling urchins from Dundee whose debut album, Hats Off to the Buskers, has just gone in at the top of the UK charts; we've got the Automatic, the indie screamo nu-rave quartet from Cardiff, purveyors of such poptastic tunes as Raoul, Recover and last year's festival favourite, Monster. We've got indie-prog sprogs Mumm-Ra, who probably still have to ask their mums if they can stay up late to play a gig. And we've got the Horrors . . .
Led by the lanky, Ichabod Crane-like figure of Faris Rotter, the Horrors trade in b-movie goth-punk, neatly embalmed in such songs as Jack the Ripper, Death in the Chapel and Sheena is a Parasite. Like mock-horror movie ghouls from the 1960s, the band dress like beatnik zombies, organ player Spyder Webb sporting a Dracula cape and Rotter draped in dark Victorian stalker clobber. If this was a production of The Rocky Horror Show, we'd probably laugh, but their corpse-grinding schlock rock is sadly all too real - and all-too excruciatingly awful, like a particularly bad attack of the Cramps. Let me out of this horror chamber, now.
Either the View ate too many sweets before coming onstage, or they're still thrilled to bits about being pop stars. Either way, they're excitable tykes, and perform their set with the jerky, hyperactive energy of puppies in a tumble dryer. Tunes crash headlong into each other like turbo-charged dodgems, and no one in the band seems to want to wait for the others to catch up with the fidgety beats. It's a pity really, because if the View would just settle down and play the songs at a relaxed rock 'n' roll pace, then us dadrockers could sing along to such fine songs as Superstar Tradesman, Wasted Little DJs and Same Jeans. Cuddly singer Kyle Falconer steps aside to let the bassist sing two songs - bad idea. Just a year ago, Arctic Monkeys stood in the same spot, poised to take the rock 'n' roll crown for 2006, and you could practically strum the atmosphere; tonight, The View elicit a more subdued sense of euphoria, and leave you with the feeling that 2007 is still anybody's for the taking.
Headline act The Automatic already seem like last year's thing, which, in a way, they are, having soundtracked last summer with the indie nu-rave anthem Monster. Some of the younger kids in the crowd might not remember that far back, but the Cardiff band deliver a noisy reminder with crunchy tracks from their album, Not Accepted Anywhere. Led by singing bassist Rob Hawkins, who looks like he'd rather be in Foo Fighters, the Automatic are a motley crew whose music doesn't seem to follow the usual rock/metal/nu-rave route, but still maintains a relentless, stomping vitality. Keyboard player/mad bastard Alex Pennie runs around the stage banging cowbells and tambourines, jumps up on the amps, and wrestles a stage invader to the ground, letting him know there's only room for one Bez-like figure in this band. The full-on attack of the Automatic's machine-gun pop soon breaks down all resistance, and they finish the night triumphantly - and firmly un-upstaged by the jangly Dundee boys. - Kevin Courtney
