Irish Times critics review American Originals at the NCH, Dublin and a performance by Lemon Jelly at the Ambassador, Dublin
American Originals at the NCH, Dublin
Ives spent most of his life in musical obscurity. The idea of a prosperous part-time composer, albeit a well-trained one, quietly and unassumingly dismantling musical tradition, and independently anticipating future trends, as Ives did, is one that many people find perplexing.
Virgil Thomson, himself a composer, and one of the most informative and entertaining music-writers of the mid 20th century, had an explanation.
Compositional style, he maintained, is likely to be influenced by a composer's source of income. Ives, who abandoned music as a profession at the age of 28, fell into Thomson's category of "naive" composers.
When the work of a naive composer turns out to be not unplayable technically, said Thomson, "it often gives a useful kick in the pants to the professional tradition." And if their work is good, the naïfs "are angels of refreshment and light, and their music is no small scandal. Its clarity is a shock to the professional mind. It doesn't hesitate about being lengthy or being brief, and it neglects completely to calculate audience-psychology . . . It is beyond mode and fashion. It is completely personal and gratuitous."
There were just three pieces by Ives in the National Symphony Orchestra's American Originals weekend. The Fourth Symphony, which wasn't heard complete until 1965, 11 years after the composer's death, is a work so sonically multi-stranded that no one listener or no one performance could possibly keep all that's of interest in it in meaningful focus.
That's part of the fascination, of course, rather like hearing too many people talk at once, yet being persuaded that you'd like to be able to re-live the experience and dwell on what each of them was saying.
Gerhard Markson's performance with the National Symphony Orchestra (with David Brophy as the second conductor called for in the second movement) was carefully controlled in the marshalling of the haunting Ivesian babble of hymns and popular tunes. The approach was like a style of illumination which penetrates everywhere, eliminating highlights as it elaborates detail.
It seemed a shame that the preparation of this gargantuan work should result in only a single performance. It's in the nature of the piece that a second hearing would almost certainly be a very different experience for all who were there, in the audience and on the stage (or elsewhere) as performers.
The New York première of the Concord Sonata in 1939 was a turning point in the reception of the composer's music. Ives was reaching his public the hard way, the complicated music of his later composing years was airing before his earlier music. This may well have gratified a man who declared, "Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair." And, whatever about easy chairs, there was no easy listening on Saturday, in Philip Martin's committed communication of Ives's most daunting piano work.
This sonata bursts at the seams, not just in terms of the notes (the performer needs at one point a strip of wood to play wide clusters), but also in terms of expressive content.
The composer, you feel, couldn't quite contain himself and gave the work a burden it can hardly bear. This is sometimes evident through apparent wanderings off topic, sometimes through a density of chordal writing which threatens to go all brown or grey, like paint that's had too many colours mixed in.
Yet the threat to unbalance is part of what makes the work so fascinating. Ives dares. He goes not just to the limit, but strains well beyond it. And the enterprise comes off.
The 21-year-old composer's hymn-based First String Quartet of 1896, played by the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet, is a less rewarding proposition - well mannered, although with little quirks, and not always rescuing itself from the threat of banality. The opening movement, which was reworked as the third movement of the Fourth Symphony, sounds altogether finer in its later context.
The main work in the RTÉCO's programme under Nicholas Kok on Saturday evening was the Second Symphony by Christopher Rouse (born 1949), a much bigger figure in his native land than his presence in European programmes readily reveals. He's an eclectic, fond of allusion and quotation. Rock group Led Zeppelin and Enya are among the influences he cites, the latter in a Flute Concerto still awaiting an Irish hearing.
Neo-classicism and Shostakovich surface clearly in his Second Symphony of 1994. The heavy elegy of the central Adagio, written in memory of fellow composer Stephen Albert, marks the finale which follows, as if the burden of grief can't quite be lifted.
Other highlights of the American Originals programme included a belated Irish première for Steve Reich's minimalist classic, Music for 18 Musicians, which split its listeners - some walked out, some gave it a standing ovation - and Sun-Treader the largest orchestral work by Carl Ruggles, who favoured a style of rugged, Schoenbergian dissonant counterpoint.
The weekend's programming strayed well off the topic its title suggested (Aaron Copland twice, but no George Antheil, Samuel Barber's String Quartet but nothing by Morton Feldman).
Yet the major rarities that were included more than made up for this strange and unnecessary dilution.
Michael Dervan
Lemon Jelly at the Ambassador, Dublin
Lemon Jelly put you in a spectacularly good mood. By rights, the music should very quickly collapse under the weight of its own kitsch and quirky samples. Instead, Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin have hardly put a beat wrong, producing three EPs and one album (Lost Horizons) of gleeful, infectious blissful chill-out psychedelic deep-folk/however-you-want
-to-categorise-it-yourself. Even tonight, they hover on the verge of naff student irony, with the Lucky Bags at the door and the bingo game for a warm-up act.
When Deakin and Franglen take the stage, it is for their first full stage show and for a while it shows. The opener Space Walk is almost scuppered as Franglen wrestles with a malfunctioning guitar lead.
They speed through the cheeky piano hook of A Tune For Jack, and a toughened up Homage To Patagonia, and prove with the ominous, slow-burning
The Curse of Ka'Zar that even when aiming for darkness they produce only light.
Yet the duo seem a little tentative as they nip about the stage, from the electric double bass to decks to guitar to synthesisers, and whatever knobs need to be twiddled in between.
Then, just as they and the crowd seem a little distracted, and as the edge seems a little blunted, the wonderful In the Bath is interrupted by a blast of Chicago's If You Leave Me Now and everything clicks into place.
They settle into a rhythm with the machinery and a delightful rapport with a lifted crowd. Franglen's vivid, primary colour graphics become more a feature of the show.
Both Page One and Return To Patagonia are given the anthemic treatment and by the time we get to Nice Day For Ducks - music for the discerning Tellytubby - we could stay here all night.
They finish on a more relaxed note with The Staunton Lick, and exit while leaping about, hugging with the relief of having got through it alive and in a mood as wonderful as that of the punters they're leaving behind.
Shane Hegarty
