Martin Adamsreviews the first of this year's RTÉ Horizons concerts and Michael Dervanreviews a musical celebration of John and Doreen Ruddock
O’Brien, RTÉ NSO/ Pearce
NCH, Dublin
Seóirse Bodley– Never to Have Lived is Best.
Stravinsky– Dumbarton Oaks.
Seóirse Bodley– Meditations on Lines from Patrick Kavanagh. Symphony No 2 (I Have Loved the Lands of Ireland – excerpt).
The first of this year’s RTÉ Horizons concerts focused on Seóirse Bodley. For the work by an admired composer, Bodley chose Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks (1938), an extreme manifestation of baroque-style neo-classicism. His choice was dictated by “the attitude of mind it represents, rather than the work considered in isolation”. In short, and as Bodley’s pre-concert talk elucidated, it represented the artist’s right to change style.
Bodley was born in 1933, and in the 1960s attended the summer schools in Darmstadt. The first work in his programme, Never to Have Lived is Best (1965), reflects that encounter with what he calls the “full-blown avant-garde idiom”. It is an accomplished piece which, like so much of Bodley’s music, has close links with literature – in this case, poems by WB Yeats. The soaring vocal lines and intricate orchestral backdrop show an admirable command of technique and, in the combination of sensuality and determined atonality, the influence of figures associated with Darmstadt, such as Pierre Boulez.
Meditations on Lines from Patrick Kavanagh was written just seven years later, but shows a very different engagement with the avant-garde. It progresses via blocks of contrasted timbre rather than rhythmic drive and, within specified parameters of volume, pitch and colour, gives the orchestral players considerable freedom.
The final work was the last movement of Symphony No 2, I Have Loved the Lands of Ireland (1980). This work applies avant-garde techniques to Irish traditional music, has a more public face than the earlier works, and represents that combination of communicativeness and technical flair that has marked so much of Bodley’s music since.
Under the baton of Colman Pearce, the players of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra were persuasive advocates for Bodley’s work. But best of all was the beautifully shaped and timed singing of soprano Sylvia O’Brien.
Series continues on Tue at 1.05pm with music by John Buckley
MARTIN ADAMS
Ruddock celebration
NCH, Dublin
A Musical Celebration of the Life and Work of John and the late Doreen Ruddock, presented in association with the Arts Council, was the celebration of four decades of musical irrepressibility. I’m too young to remember the earliest years of the Limerick Music Association (LMA), through which the Ruddock husband-and-wife team and their friends began presenting concerts in Limerick. They opened with the Berlin Philharmonic Octet in February 1967, and four years later started adding venues in Dublin.
It was the LMA which gave Romanian pianist Radu Lupu and Korean violinist Kyung Wha Chung their first Irish recitals, and brought the work of Hungarian pianists Zoltán Kocsis, Dezsö Ránki and András Schiff to attention here before they had won wide international recognition. It also began a string of relationships – with the likes of the Takács and Vogler string quartets, pianists Tamás Vásáry and Piotr Anderszewski, baritones Håkan Hagegård and Wolfgang Holzmair, and clarinettist Michael Collins – which resulted in long-term connections and repeated visits.
The LMA concert organisers were not the kind to be much swayed by the greatness of a name. Yes, there were appearances by Isaac Stern, the Amadeus Quartet, the whole Tortelier family and others who were already famous when they received the call to Limerick. But the excitement and adventure of many an LMA concert had to do with encountering new talent that been sought out on the basis of the association’s exacting musical taste.
There was one notorious instance when the LMA turned its back on new talent, and made world headlines in doing so. In 1993 the NCH subverted a behind-the-scenes attempt by the St Petersburg State Orchestra to substitute its own choice of pianist, Vladimir Mischuk, for Vladimir Ovchinnikov, the Leeds competition prize-winner who had been booked for the orchestra’s Irish and British tour. A day later, in Limerick, the orchestra refused to accompany Ovchinnikov and the LMA refused to allow Mischuk to replace him, instead getting Ovchinnikov to play solo items to replace the concerto (which the orchestra later added, with Mischuk, as an encore). The orchestra finally got its way in Belfast by sneaking Mischuk on stage, changing the programme order and playing the concerto first. The world’s media were delighted by such squabbling in the world of classical music.
There were no such squabbles in this three-hour celebratory programme. The Vogler Quartet opened and closed the evening, joined by a magisterial Michael Collins for Mozart’s sublime Clarinet Quintet, and Finghin Collins (piano) and Pieter Riegelbauer (double bass) for a friskily upbeat account of Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Finghin Collins also contributed a young man’s headstrong account of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, while baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, partnered by pianist Russell Ryan, offered a selection of Schubert songs shot through with an often smiling wisdom and resignation.
MICHAEL DERVAN
