A round-up of reviews from Irish Timeswriters.
Douze Points
Project Arts Centre
Douze Points debuted the Improvised Music Company's Eurovision for young European jazz musicians, minus the contest, national juries and identikit musical merde. Drawing on acts from France, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Benelux, Douze Points showed in more than 12 concerts in four days just how diverse, vibrant and imaginative music has become in the Old World.
They looked, inter alia, to classical music (Ireland's White Rocket) and folk (Romania's Dimitar Bodurov) as much as to jazz; to technology (Norway's Puma); backwards to punk rock (Britain's Led Bib); bop (Holland's Tineke Postma Quartet) and free improv (France's La Poche à Sons); or, like Sweden's Nils Berg, managed to reference almost all these sources, sometimes with mixed results. But they rarely disappointed and, in one case, revealed a great new talent (Finland's Verneri Pohjola).
After La Poche à Sons opened the festival, Hungary's Daniel Szabo's classy, if not strikingly individual piano trio impressed, despite a meticulous concern to cross every "t" and dot every "i". But Led Bib offered a corrective with a raucous mix of punk and jazz, played with an in-your-face irreverence and wit; this was high-energy scorched earth, with fierce blowing from saxophonists Chris Williams and Pete Grogan in an ensemble characterised by leader Mark Holub's combustible drumming.
Although there were soporific moments - a flat set from altoist Tineke Postma and the limited emotional scope of singer Melanie De Biasio - they were the only ones. Berlin's Carsten Daerr Trio, in a set full of humour, personality, imagination and risk-taking, made light of the often tricky music they performed. And the strength of Denmark's Light Airborne lay in the writing of saxophonist/flautist Niels Lykkegaard, which created a persuasively melancholic atmosphere, full of nostalgia, though not fully exploited by an under-rehearsed band.
Romania's Dimitar Bodurov's solo piano concert drew almost exclusively on his country's folk dance, love songs and celebrations of place, with their unusual time signatures, cross-rhythms and characteristic melodic lines. He brilliantly stamped his own identity on the material and showed another aspect of his musical persona, with a distinctive exploration of Coltrane's Giant Steps.
Multi-reedman Nils Berg's music was a wry, ironic take on folk, jazz, classical and pop, transmuted into a homogenous whole by his compositions and the band's jointly wrought arrangements. In Berg and vibist Mattias Stahl it had one of the strongest front lines of the festival. And though Puma's measured and adventurous interaction was not to my taste, there was a constant sense of discovery about their electronic soundscapes.
The best came last. Leading Finland's marvellous working quartet, Ilmiliekki, trumpeter Verneri Pohjola had the mark of greatness. A mix of Tomasz Stanko, Arve Henriksen and Miles Davis, all welded into a personal concept, in a festival with more than its share of outstanding young musicians, he was of a different order.
With the technique and the nerve to do anything, and the judgment to go with it, his rubato playing was spare and poised, every note placed to perfection, using contrasts of register and tone superbly. His choices were constantly surprising but logical, no matter how freely he played, and his band, particularly pianist Tuomo Prättälä, is a class act, but Pohjola is special.
The same goes for the idea behind Douze Points. Already unique, it has the potential to grow into something important, like the Sundance film festival, but without the danger of creating a musical sub-genre aimed at such an event. The young musicians will see that doesn't happen. Ray Comiskey
Zanon, RTÉ NSO/Eddins
NCH, Dublin
Haydn - Symphony No 60 (Il distratto). Benjamin Dwyer - Guitar concerto No 2. Villa-Lobos - Bachiana Brasileira No 4. Ravel - Daphnis and Chloe Suite No 2
For his new guitar concerto, Benjamin Dwyer played with the ideas of the guitar as orchestra and orchestra as a guitar. His starting point was not the fact that the soloist in a guitar concerto is usually amplified, but a remark by the great guitarist Andrés Segovia that the guitar is a miniature orchestra.
The most obvious moment of role-swapping was a gesture that saw the orchestral violins and violas strumming their instruments, guitar-like, on their laps. The heart of the new work is actually the slow movement, a passacaille on a rather unprepossessing chromatic scale where the interest turns out to be not so much one of harmony as of ever-elaborating embellishment of line.
The opening is actually the work's cadenza, and includes some of the piece's most effective guitar writing. The orchestra's later takeover of the passacaille material is a lot more diffuse.
The opening and closing movements seem to work their ideas a lot harder and to rather less effect. The first movement is sometimes almost minimalist in manner, and the folksy rhythms of the finale cover the same ground too many times. Brazilian guitarist Fabio Zanon, for whom the concerto was written, was at all times authoritative, and his playing was hugely resourceful in the colouring and nuancing of the solo line.
Conductor William Eddins secured well-judged balances in the guitar concerto. His handling of Haydn's Symphony No. 60 (Il distratto) was light and stylish. He delivered the slow surges of Villa-Lobos's Bachiana Brasileira No 4 with sometimes massive power. And there was great transparency and detail in his delineation of the sensuous textures of the second suite from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.
True, none of the three performances quite delivered on the expectations they managed to engender.
But it was rewarding to hear the orchestra so successfully inhabit such disparate musical worlds in the course of a single evening. Michael Dervan
Jerry Creedon and Friends
NCH, John Field Room, Dublin
A Latin-themed programme presented by Cork-based guitarist Jerry Creedon and his five-member string ensemble included Argentinian pieces in picture-postcard vein, and gave seven Beatles songs the tango treatment.
Carlos Guastavino's gushingly tuneful Jeromita Linares (a tone-portrait of an old woman dimly recollected from the composer's childhood) suggested the kind of easy background-listening experience you'd associate with the chink of teacups amid the fronds of a palm court.
There was more bite to Máximo Diego Pujol's images of four quarters of Buenos Aires - a suite that mixes the ubiquitous steps of tango with the more asymmetrical rhythms of bossa nova and candombe, and depicts the frenetic cityscape with Bartókian acerbity.
Creedon's solo passages emerged as mild and thoughtful soliloquies that tended to downplay the music's jostling cross-rhythms. But his cohorts made more of their opportunities to energise things, with nicely pointed syncopations from violinist Larissa O'Grady, and bouncy pizzicato bass-lines from cellist Ilse de Ziah.
All the musicians were given interesting things to do in Leo Brouwer's From Yesterday to Penny Lane, a set of re-workings of classic pop songs that might be described as a provocative modern corollary of Bach's chorale preludes.
With his addition of subtle steam-train imagery to Ticket to Ride, a fresh, recitative-like accompaniment to Yesterday, and brisk fugato episodes to Eleanor Rigby, this versatile Afro-Cuban composer-arranger has secured the approbation of more than just the Beatles' ever-vigilant copyright lawyers. Andrew Johnstone
