Two concerts reviewed
Composers' Choice, Ailís Ní Ríain NCH, John Field Room
The composer Ailís Ní Ríain was born in Cork in 1974, trained in Cork, York and Manchester, and now lives in the West Yorkshire village of Walsden. Composer, of course, may not be quite the right description. In the pre-concert talk with Bernard Clarke for her Composers' Choice programme at the National Concert Hall (NCH) she said that she considers herself to be an artist rather than just a composer; she also paints and writes.
The possible importance of the distinction came to mind frequently during the programme that followed. In conversation, Ní Ríain presented herself as an intelligent, clear thinker, working with good, workable ideas. The compositions, on the other hand, were diffuse. Instrumental lines often jostled uncomfortably, as if no viable balance or contrast could be achieved between them. The sense of purpose, of trajectory, of rhetoric was very limited, even though the level of activity and volume were high. The ideas simply weren't yielding much in the way of interesting music.
The evening's repertoire included a work setting texts by Christy Brown (A Song for My Body of 1998), a piece inspired by a Jacques Brel song (Surrealist Pilgrims, commissioned by the NCH for this concert), music written while recovering from ill-health ("a very personal piece", The Last Time I Died ... [ offered you my pulse, gave you my breath], 2001), "a programmatic piece detailing the true story of Lucy the boar who escaped from an abattoir in Timperley, Cheshire", (Rogue Boar Shot Dead (last adventure), from 2002) and Attrition, a 2001 collaboration with poet Kenneth Clarke commissioned by RTÉ after the composer won the Millennium Composer of the Future Competition, but left in limbo until this concert, after RTÉ's abandonment of that competition.
The strongest impression, however, was made by a much simpler work, FWD: (no subject) (2003), a straightforward display piece for that most demonstrative of instruments, the trumpet, played in straightforward display style by Mark O'Keeffe.
The over-long programme (which ran to nearly two-and-a-half hours) also included works by Manchester-based New Yorker Kevin Malone (Count Me In, a piano and computer-processed sound piece that's risible in its political pretensions), Roger Doyle (a sampling from an extension of his Passades project, The Ninth Set, which sets transformed female voice against elaborate background textures), as well as Jane O'Leary's Silenzio della Terra and Marian Ingoldsby's Red Shoes.
The most rewarding piece of the evening, however, was Jürgen Simpson's new Rotating Patterns for pianist (the evening's most hard-worked performer, Mary McCague) and electronics. Simpson's musical material, with a kind of floating, improvisational air, was admittedly clichéd. But his blurring of the boundaries between acoustic and electronic elements produced the freshest effects of the evening. - Michael Dervan
NCC/MacKayHugh Lane gallery, Dublin
The show must go on. Amid its recent, well-publicised upheavals, culminating in the resignation of artistic director Celso Antunes and three others, the National Chamber Choir carried on preparing for its annual spring tour which it kicked off at Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery.
Contrary to what one might expect in the circumstances, the 16 singers appeared fresh, positive, and full of energy. It was their first public appearance since the story broke on January 31st.
Tour conductor Brian MacKay has built a wide-ranging programme around the generously open-ended theme encapsulated in the words "let us sing". Accordingly, the tour is entitled "Cantemus", the name of Hungarian composer Lajos Bardos's jubilant, fanfare-like piece with which the choir both opened and closed, the first time out of sight of the audience.
Bach's double-choir motet Singet dem Herrn, a setting of Psalm 147 "Sing to the Lord a new song", had a lean and lively spring to it as the two choirs sent music back and forth.
Next was a short sequence of animal-themed pieces from the Renaissance, including quick and nimble accounts of Josquin's tribute to the amorous cricket (El grillo) and Adriano Banchieri's comic compilation of dog, cat and bird sounds in Contrapunto bestiale. In between came the programme's first reflective pause in Orlando Gibbons's well-known lament on the struggle of beauty in the world, The Silver Swan.
The next pause came soon after in the first of Brian Boydell's 1967 Three Madrigals. His setting of lines by Philip Sydney ("Oh my thoughts, my thoughts surcease") has a raw and delicate quality, and the choir's serene performance was a highlight.
Stylistically the set fuses the 16th and 20th centuries, three gems of a choral legacy from the late Irish composer who hosted regular dinner parties for the express purpose of singing madrigals.
The final set comprised Hungarian pieces. Kodaly's Norwegian Girls of 1940 proffers solidarity to Norway in gentle resistance to foreign invasion. Two folk-inspired miniatures from Bartok's 27 Choruses and Bardos's love-lost Dana dana concluded the set, all sung with sparkle and clearly benefitting from MacKay's two-year immersion in this repertoire in Hungary. - Michael Dungan
