Reviewed: McCrann, Schirmer, Ives Ensemble and Guinness Choir & Orchestra/Milne Mount
McCrann, Schirmer
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Mozart - Sonatas in B flat K378; in E minor K304; in B flat K454
The Dublin-born violinist Maighread McCrann graduated from Trinity in the early 1980s and went to Vienna to continue her studies. She never really came back. Within 10 years she had been appointed leader of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, no mean feat for a foreign woman in the city's conservative, male-dominated orchestral culture. In recent years she has devoted much of her time to teaching in the university in Graz, where she is a professor of violin.
In her spoken introduction to the second item, the two-movement E minor sonata K 304 from 1778, McCrann ventured purposefully into the often irresistible but hazardous exercise of connecting Mozart's music with events in his life. Those, for example, who hear tragedy and portents of death in his penultimate symphony - the well-known No 40 in G minor - are then hard-pressed to explain the triumph and exuberance which characterises his last, the Jupiter, composed in the same fortnight.
He wrote K 304, however, following the death of his mother, so that it is very hard not to associate its raw emotional power with that event. McCrann, having pinned her colours to the mast, was even more persuasive in her playing. She achieved this through understatement, both in the tormented grieving of the opening Allegro and in the forlorn little Menuetto. There was here a tenderness which made her suave, virtuosic account of the K378 in B flat seem rather cool by comparison.
There was yet another change of approach in the altogether jollier Sonata in B flat K 454. McCrann, who also plays baroque violin with ensembles including Harnoncourt's Concentus Musicus Wien, played this, her final item, with a sprightly purity and a less-is-more use of vibrato.
She was sensitively partnered throughout by pianist Markus Schirmer, a colleague in Graz, who maintained an ideally complementary balance in works that were, after all, published as sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment. - Michael Dungan
Ives Ensemble
John Field Room (NCH)
Stravinsky - Three Pieces for String Quartet. Kevin Volans - She Who Sleeps With a Small Blanket. Gerald Barry - Quintet (1994). Geoffrey Hannan - Centrifugal Bumblepuppy. Feldman - The Viola in My Life 2. Andrew Hamilton - music for roger casement.
Dublin-born Andrew Hamilton is a composer who, at the age 29, is his own man, even though he soaks up influence like a sponge. His Composer's Choice concert had an excellent programme, and the Dutch-based Ives Ensemble proved eminently capable of meeting wide-ranging musical and technical demands. All the music he chose to preface the first Irish performance of his music for roger casement has these in common - tightness, a feeling for craft as a tool that can break convention as well as acknowledge it, and strong ideas that can endure startling juxtapositions.
In all these respects, Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet (1916) set a high standard that did not dwarf the works that followed. Kevin Volans's She Who Sleeps With a Small Blanket, for one percussion player, harnesses rhythmic energy, timbre and pitch with astonishing subtlety. Gerald Barry's Quintet for cor anglais, clarinet, piano cello and double bass brims with rhythmic energy too; and its textural colour and variety are astonishing.
Bumblepuppy is American for swingball; and Geoffrey Hannan's Centrifugal Bumblepuppy bats ideas around with joyously anarchic energy. The contrast with Morton Feldman's The Viola in My Life 2 could hardly be greater: fascinating quietness, everything in just the right place.
Hamilton's music for Roger Casement is scored for 11 instruments, and at 24 minutes is his longest work thus far. It tests material that the composer intends to use for a theatre work on Casement. Commonplace things - minor chords, a few arpeggios, a snatch of a popular song - are combined, but with frenzied dislocation, overlapping, and repetition that treads close to excess without getting there. Although it is predominantly loud it does not shout: material, of which there's a lot, is commanded so subtly that one is drawn in. - Martin Adams
Guinness Choir & Orchestra/Milne Mount
Argus Church, Dublin
Mendelssohn - St Paul
With choruses outnumbering arias by a ratio of nearly three to one, Mendelssohn's seldom-heard Biblical epic on the life and works of the Apostle Paul holds many treats in store for a society like the Guinness Choir. It may not have the clear narrative and cohesive drama of his later and more popular oratorio, Elijah, but the music is toothsome.
Conductor David Milne made a graceful sequence of the 45 movements. He had taken the hard option of giving the work in German, which did commendable justice to vocal percussions that are lost in the English translation.
The chorus were at their best when carried along by, rather than carrying, the music. Particularly during the stoning of St Stephen and other crowd scenes, their energies came in tremendous bursts. In contrast, the serene moment of Paul's conversion was marked with focused and balanced tones by the girls' voices of Kilkenny College Chamber Choir.
If the Guinness altos could be underpowered and apt to hurry their lines, that may have been partly due to the last-minute promotion of leading chorus member Tanya Sewell, who proved an able and musicianly substitute for the indisposed mezzo-soprano soloist Victoria Massey. At some risk to their considerable vocal charms, soloists Cara O'Sullivan (soprano) and John Elwes (tenor) spared no pains to dramatise their copious recitatives. Nicholas Folwell (baritone) characterised the utterances of the titular saint with patriarchal dignity.
The marbled surfaces and lofty vaults of Mount Argus Church had a mixed effect for the audience. The sound of the strings (and often of the chorus) was distanced, while the impact of the wind and brass was magnified. What was lost in the blurring of details was gained in a burnished blend of instruments and voices, and in some lively and thrilling fortissimos. - Andrew Johnstone
