Irish Times writers review a selection of events
Printing House Festival of New Music
Printing House, TCD
The Printing House Festival of New Music, held for the first time last weekend, is a thoroughly idealistic undertaking. Its two director/curators, Benedict Schlepper- Connolly and Garrett Sholdice, were not only hands-on organisers, but, since both also compose and perform, they both played and had their music played, too.
The compositional focus of this tightly conceived and well-organised festival was almost exclusively on America and Ireland, with only Arvo Pärt and Kurt Schwitters making it in from elsewhere. And although the American focus included pieces by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the attention was mostly on altogether less familiar figures, including Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Larry Polansky and Charles Amirkhanian.
Pride of place, however, went to James Tenney, a leading American experimental composer who died in August at the age of 72, and who obviously made a deep impression on Schlepper-Connolly and Sholdice on a visit to Dublin earlier this year. Tenney was a theoretician and researcher as well as a composer, and his work in psychoacoustics and music cognition informed his approach to composition. The festival offered a selection from his set of Postal Pieces from the early 1970s. These pieces, each of which is written on a single postcard, are intentionally without drama. They present a prospect - Swell Piece #1 is exactly what it says, Koan pursues a sliding pitch through a two-string rocking figuration on violin - and then they deliver on it. The idea is for the listener to live fully in the moment.
Unfortunately, as things turned out, it was not often easy to live in the moment over the two days of the festival. The problem was a simple one. Far too many of the performances were simply substandard. The basics of accurate rhythm, ensemble and intonation were bypassed time after time. I've never heard such a shambolic performance of Steve Reich's Clapping Music as the one undertaken by two members of the vocal quartet Bulraga. And the group's uncertain pitching in Tenney's
A Rose is a Rose is a Round painfully undermined the watertight compositional conception. There was a lot during the nine concerts of the festival which had to be taken on faith.
Four of the concerts featured solo piano, two of them given over to improvisations. The shared characteristics between Paul G Smyth and Jürgen Simpson were an over-reliance on the sustaining pedal - mostly used to provide a washy background like an over-prominent digital echo effect - and a naive indulgence in speed and volume to compensate for the slowness and thinness of the musical thinking. A typical organ improvisation would be the epitome of tightness and density by comparison with these players' offerings.
The two main evening concerts, given by Minneapolis-based visiting pianist Matthew McCright, stood out for the focus and clarity of their delivery. His programmes included Frederic Rzewski's De Profundis, a haunting setting of Oscar Wilde for vocalising, whistling, singing and speaking pianist, and the first performance of Sholdice's Etude, which, at over 95 minutes, must have gone straight into the record books as the longest piano piece by an Irish composer.
The festival as a whole was one in which concerns about idea and process dominated conventional notions of form and content. Sholdice's Etude, like a slow-motion replay of an already slow original, played out its pattern with such persistent, grey-on-grey gentleness that it mostly avoided making any impact. It moved but it stayed still. It changed but it remained the same.
The most notable of the festival's premieres were both by women, Judith Ring's electroacoustic Pre_per_form For Beau Stocker sounding like an electronic extravaganza for über percussionist, and Linda Buckley's Zone (solo piano, McCright), which toyed successfully with a kind of Ligeti-like mechanism. Michael Dervan
Less Than A Year
The Georgian House, Limerick
Many theatre practitioners are sceptical about the value of verbatim theatre, a form that makes use of testimony by real people to represent events that actually occurred.
At its best, it's a style of theatre that can give a voice to the voiceless, while highlighting issues of social importance. The problem, however, is that it also presents itself as conveying "the truth". This can obscure the extent to which the events being described have been edited, mediated, and interpreted by writers, actors, and directors. So instead of giving expression to people on the social margins, verbatim theatre risks exploiting them, using their stories to authenticate a one-sided political argument. In Island Theatre's Less Than A Year, first-time playwright Helena Enright shows that she's fully aware of the potential of this form, as well as the problems associated with it.
Her play gains extraordinary power from its use of the testimony of an actual Irish couple, whose daughter died from Ewing's sarcoma in 2002. Their story is told in a form of speech that is subjective, self-contradictory, and full of slips and non-sequiturs. In a work of fiction, this might seem like bad writing, but here it provides valuable insight into the couple's struggles to come to terms with their daughter's illness, and the apparent indifference of the Irish health service to their situation.
Director Liam Halligan wisely chooses to emphasise the theatricality of the play, using slide projections, video and lighting to underscore key themes. Similarly, the parents are presented not as actual people, but simply as Father (Séamus Moran) and Mother (Joan Sheehy): they could be any Irish couple from any part of the country.
These techniques sometimes lack subtlety, demanding that audiences interpret the action in particular ways. But they also transform the story from personal testimony into a universal dilemma, giving the play political bite. Enright ensures that we leave the theatre deeply moved by the parents' story. But, more importantly, she also demands that we consider seriously the current state of the Irish health service, and how it treats our own parents, our own children. Patrick Lonergan
Run concluded. It will tour from Feb 2007
Ardee Baroque
Various venues
The third annual Ardee Baroque Festival vindicated the use of venues outside the main centres of population. As in previous years, the Irish Baroque Orchestra was the main ensemble. The quality and consistency of the IBO's playing has been transformed over the last three years, thanks to a well-judged combination of artistic and management policies, the appointment of Monica Huggett as the orchestra's leader, and the establishment of the IBO Chamber Soloists, a core group of around five players. I was sorry to miss the Soloists' Saturday afternoon programme of French baroque chamber music in Ardee Castle.
Throughout the full-orchestra concerts on Friday and Sunday nights, in the fine acoustic of St Mary's Church of Ireland, it was clear that Huggett is the best sort of leader. While her authority commands, it does not dictate. She defines the character of each piece; but because she draws everyone into her vision, the playing has telling unanimity, even when taking risks.
A striking instance was the Forlane movement from Bach's Suite No 1 in C, BWV1066. The top and bottom parts bounced along in a fast, strongly accented triple time; and the flying semiquavers of the inner parts were an energising buzz. Sometimes a little more discipline would have made things even better, as in the fugal section of the Overture to the Suite No 2 BWV1067, where the fugal entries were not always articulated consistently as they passed from section to section.
Highlights of these Bach performances included the extraordinary sensuousness and superb virtuosity of the three oboes and bassoon in the Suite No 4 BWV1069. Another was the concertos in A for harpsichord, BWV1055, and A minor for violin, BWV1041. As Huggett explained lucidly, these were probably designed to be played one to a part. Listening to the intimate balance between orchestra and soloist (Malcolm Proud and Huggett respectively) was revelatory and fully persuasive. Another highlight was the Concerto in D minor for two violins, BWV1043, with Huggett and her former pupil Claire Duff, co-violinist in the IBO Chamber Soloists, as ideal partners - perfectly matched, distinct personalities.
In both concerts, the IBO's rhythmic energy was captivating. It was strongly accented; but the beat was always shaped by metre, and the drive towards cadences gave each movement a convincing overall shape.
In the dance-based movements, such as the final Gigue of the Suite No 3, BWV1068, the playing had the energy of a Brueghelian peasant gathering - earthy and elevating.
Saturday night's concert was given by the IBO's associated choir, Resurgam, conducted by Mark Duley. With complete confidence, they sang demanding 16th- and 17th-century polychoral music from Italy, Spain and Germany; and when there were occasional signs of pressure on technique, expressive focus was undisturbed.
There were also solos from the continuo players Tristan Russcher (organ) and Siobhán Armstrong (harps). The latter's playing of Spanish baroque harp in a set of variations by Cabezón was a subtle highlight of this festival. This concert was held in the Church of Ireland parish church in Collon, an extraordinary, beautiful building with an ideal acoustic.
The full choral sound - and this choir can sound as if it is much larger than it actually is - bloomed, but with a clarity that enabled you to appreciate the discourse between the choral groups. This was a music festival that could hold up its head anywhere. Martin Adams
Tritschler, Lepper
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
No detail seemed to have eluded the forethought of tenor Robin Tritschler when he planned this programme of songs for Mozart's 250th anniversary year.
In contrast to Schubert's output of more than 600 Lieder, Mozart's corpus of fewer than 40 offers a somewhat restricted choice. Yet Tritschler succeeded in putting together a varied selection of 15 items which, though chronologically performed, fell into five self-contained groups - each a balanced, miniature recital in itself. And because each group's explanatory notes appeared on a separate page of the programme supplement, there was a clear sense of when, and when not, to applaud.
These presentational subtleties were symptomatic of all-round artistry on the part of Tritschler and his accompanist Simon Lepper. Their constant sensitivity to the text ensured that in the strophic songs An die Einsamkeit (To loneliness, K340) and Die Verschweigung (The secret, K518), no two verses sounded alike. Tritschler's Italian and French accents were polished in three non-German items: Ridente la calma (May a happy calm, K210), Oiseaux, si tous les ans (You birds, so every year, K284) and Dans un bois (In a forest, K295).
If in the German songs there was a slight tendency to sacrifice certain weak syllables to the phrasing, that was hardly for want of fluency. Indeed, Tritschler was able to exercise his notable command of German recitative thanks to the Kleine Deutsche Kantate K619 - a Masonic curiosity dating from 1791. There was some judicious vocal humour too - a yawn for the bedtime ending of Das Kinderspiel (Children's song, K 598), and a haggardly voix naturelle to personify Die Alte (The old woman, K517). But these were temporary departures from a rich, regular voice production that was uniformly pleasing across wide ranges of pitch, expression and intensity. Andrew Johnstone
