Irish Times reviewers take in the Sonorities classical music festival and the RTE NSO at the National Concert Hall.
Sonorities Festival, Belfast
It's quite a year for Sonorities, Belfast's annual festival of contemporary music. The festival got to present the first public concert at Queen's University's £4.5 million Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC).
Its unique state-of-the-art performance space for electro-acoustic music, the Sonic Laboratory Concert Hall, uses its five levels of loudspeakers - one at ear level, plus two above and two below the audience - to provide surround sound in all dimensions to listeners seated on a grill-gridded, acoustically transparent floor.
And the festival opened with a weekend primarily devoted to the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, with the great man himself presiding at the sound desk. Stockhausen formally opened the SARC building a few days before the festival started.
One of the great ironies of the Stockhausen visit was that the performances of his own music had to be presented in the Whitla Hall, as the space at SARC is rather too small for the size of audience one of the greatest living figures in the area of electronics and music might be expected to attract.
In Stockhausen's youth, there were competing factions, one in favour of purely electronic music, the other more interested in the use of pre-recorded, or concrete sounds.
Stockhausen's two Electronic Studies of 1953 and 1954 stemmed from his desire "to compose the timbres, the colours of sounds," essentially to synthesize new sounds by electronic means, the first study based on combinations of pure sine waves, the second working with that broad spectrum hiss known as white noise.
There's quite an aesthetic gap between these two pieces, and the other two heard in the opening concert. Gesang der Jünglinge, (Song of the Youth) combines (and often elides the distinction between) electronic sounds and the pre-recorded voice of a 12-year-old boy intoning texts from the Book of Daniel.
This is a highly-evocative, mesmerisingly virtuoso display of sonic and spatial wizardry, originally conceived as a five-track composition, but long reduced for practical reasons to four (the extra track was above the audience).
Even more astonishing in detail is Kontakte (Contacts) of 1959-60, another landmark in the history of electronic music, in which most of the material was created with an impulse generator - a fanciful analogy to what this involves would be the painstaking building up of artificial matter from nuclear particles.
To be sure, some of the effects are very much of their time, and some of them suffer from having being borrowed and put to hackneyed use by others.
But Kontakte remains one of the most cogent works of its kind, with an internal cohesion that's rare among electronic works. And with Stockhausen at the controls, the spatial realisation was simply breathtaking.
The second Stockhausen evening, devoted to the four regions of Hymnen (Anthems) (1966-67), a work utilising national anthems, was, by comparison, something of an anti-climax.
In spite of some glorious moments, principally in regions two and four, it's simply too long, too self-indulgent, too uneven, though, again, with the composer's sound-projection, it provided an object lesson in what was spatially achievable with pre-digital, four-track tape.
The new space at SARC has facilities that will surely make it a place of pilgrimage for those pressing at the boundaries of electro-acoustic performance. Not much from under the floor made an impact in the opening concert at lunchtime on Saturday, but, then, there's not been much written which makes demands in this area, and listeners may well need to learn new attention patterns.
Existing attention patterns were best rewarded in John Chowning's Stria, an early lRCAM commission, first heard in 1977. Chowning addressed the conundrum of why pitch identity resides in the octave by creating a piece which exploits pseudo octaves governed by the ratio of the golden mean.
The effect was of a rather strange choir (and later organ) created out of the sound world of a glass harmonica.
Rachel Holstead's Enchant is a spare piece, employing samples of female voices. It's so spare, in fact, that, rather than wearying the ear with overworked or over-elaborated material, it left one at the end wondering what more she might have done with her often delicate, highly evocative sounds - a rare achievement this.
The other pieces, world premières by Gordon Delap (Pathless Desert) and Iain McCurdy (Shapes), plus Ed Bennett's El Tigre, fell into more familiar and diffuse patterns of electro acoustic sound exploration.
The new venue seemed able to sustain extremely high volume levels without the unpleasant side effects that are usually encountered.
At the lower levels, it communicates the tiniest whisper with clarity.
I was surprised, however, a number of times, to find the sound at right angles to my sitting position even more impressive than when I faced forward.
Michael Dervan
Glemser, RTÉ NSO/Markson NCH, Dublin
Seóirse Bodley - Metamorphoses on the Name Schumann. Schumann - Piano Concerto. Spring Symphony.
Seóirse Bodley's specially commissioned Metamorphoses on the Name Schumann opened Gerhard Markson's four-concert Schumannfest with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall on Friday.
Bodley's piece is based on a 16-note tone row incorporating four notes derived from the letters of Schumann's name.
Even if you mostly can't hear the embedding - it's most prominent at the start and finish of the ten-minute piece - it adds hugely to the listening experience just knowing it's in there.
For me this unlyrical, rather disjointed-sounding music unexpectedly and pleasantly prompted a vision of going through a vast, uninhabited mansion - now running, now idling - and variously studying or just glimpsing the contents of each room.
Fleeting, rhythmically irregular figures and gestures pop up then vanish in wildly divergent registers.
The flute and tuba, for example, play an improbable duet, while beneath them the strings slide up and down in a series of glissandi.
In one room the pace eases while the strings play a quiet, chordal passage with harmonies reminiscent of Bartók.
Then, the rest over, the music dashes onwards to its conclusion.
It's weird, without obvious homage to Schumann, and highly engaging.
Soloist Bernd Glemser exploited a technical capacity of breathtaking assurance in a moving performance of Schumann's emotionally-charged Piano Concerto.
He indulged romantic licence to the full in a reading that was rich in lingering rubato and voluptuously shaped phrasing.
Markson clearly intends not merely to conduct, but to champion Schumann' s oft-maligned symphonies during the course of these four concerts.
He opened with the First Symphony, the Spring, whose vibrant energy Schumann linked not so much to spring itself, but to the longing for spring.
Markson's rewarding account was characteristically thorough and streamlined. It whetted the appetite for the rest of the cycle.
