Sonorities, Belfast's festival of contemporary music, celebrated its 20th anniversary with one of its largest and longest programmes of recent years. The opening weekend incorporated the Sonic Arts Network's annual conference (already reviewed here by Martin Adams), and the last four days also embraced much in the way of electro acoustic music, from the Crash Ensemble, trumpeter Jonathan Impett, violinist Darragh Morgan, the ensemble Icebreaker, and the National Symphony Orchestra under Gerhard Markson (where grotesque amplification even crept into Maria Kliegel's fine performance of the First Cello Concerto by Alfred Schnittke). Just three of the concerts I attended, a programme of percussion by Pedro Carneiro and two piano recitals by Andrew Zolinsky, dispensed entirely with the blandishments of electronics.
A small number of works stood out from the 40-plus the four days offered. Roger Doyle's playfully serious tape piece, The Idea and its Shadow, a work which offers what its title suggests in both words and music, retained its fascination on a second concert hearing. It featured in the Crash Ensemble's concert just before Maarten Altena's jazzy, dynamically driven Tik, a piece with a relentless percussion part which brings out the best in these players.
Crash's programme was heavily modified from the one advertised in the festival brochure (only four of the original nine works remained) and Pedro Carneiro's allmarimba programme suffered even greater changes, due to "instrument unavailability". In the event it was one of the works for marimba that hadn't been in the original programme, Hans Werner Henze's Five Scenes from the Snow Country which lifted this concert out of the realm of instrumental absorption and into an area of more free-spirited musical adventuring.
One of the frequent issues at electro-acoustic concerts is the extent to which thresholds of pain and hearing damage are going to be breached. After initial excesses, the Crash Ensemble have more recently been showing sensitivity in this regard and Icebreaker, one of the noisiest ensembles around, showed a bit more restraint than on their first visit to Sonorities in 1995. The major work on offer, Trance by Michael Gordon of New York's Bang on a Can All Stars, is as remarkable for the individual character of its basic riff as for the rather fruitless pursuit of spinning it out into a 50-minute work. Just as in Victorian times the compulsion towards large-scale oratorio led many a composer astray and in the 1920s the fashionability of neo-classicism led to a lot of vapid notespinning, there are great dangers today in the long spans that are so readily yielded by minimalist procedures.
The most interesting of the Irish works that were new to me didn't actually turn out to be any of the festival's premieres, but Stephen Gardner's no-holds-barred piano romp, Hold On Big Lad, played as to the manner born by Andrew Zolinsky.
The major festival commission was David Byers' new orchestral work, Crooked Lymbecks. The title, which refers to an old distilling apparatus, is taken from a poem by John Donne, and the musical materials "are based on a blend of 12th-century organum and discant". The piece has a feeling of being pared back, in ways that the ear can relate to some of the more recent works by John Kinsella and Seoirse Bodley. But even when it's running at its barest, with simple-seeming counterpoint or interlacing lines, Byers's writing, for all its plainness, seems to have the intricacy of a rhythmic tongue-twister. The NSO's performance under Gerhard Markson was more dutiful than free-flowing or fluent, with much essential material masked in the strange balances that resulted from having the orchestra on the floor of the Whitla Hall. It was hard to know whether in this piece the composer had discovered a new vision or merely caught sight of a chimera.
