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East Cork Early Music Festival
Cloyne Cathedral; North Cathedral, Cork
East Cork's third annual Early Music Festival culminated in two concerts of early 17th-century Italian music that were notable credits to the imagination and discernment of artistic director Sarah Cunningham.
Harking back to the time when instruments of contrasting tone quality mixed with greater freedom than in later periods, Dutch ensemble In Stil Moderno pitted two baroque violins against three sackbuts - those less brightly burnished, quieter and more sociable forerunners of the modern trombone.
As well as bringing these five instruments together for a number of tutti items, a neatly devised programme combined them with an ever-present yet discreet organ continuo in nearly every possible duo, trio and quartet formation.
The varied sonorities were by turns more splendid and more soothing than would be expected in the carpeted, claustrophobic chancel of Cloyne Cathedral.
The music, by nine of Monteverdi's Venetian colleagues and much of it radically modern for its time, included four canzonas as standardised in design as any four Venetian gondolas (and not much easier to tell apart).
The most individual voice proved to be that of Dario Castello, in whose Sonata Concertante (from a 1644 collection) the sackbuts matched the agility of the violins.
This attractive and well-timed evening was a perfect hors d'uvre for the following night's performance of Monteverdi's Vespers - the first in this country on period instruments - which placed accomplished Flemish ensemble Currende in the more sumptuous acoustics of Cork's North Cathedral.
In the seven decades since the Vespers was rediscovered by modern musicians, much scholarly controversy has surrounded the exegesis of Monteverdi's intentions and the interpretation of his often bewildering notation. In a programme note, Currende's director, Erik van Nevel - who is no newcomer to the piece - dismisses any idea that his current reading could be the definitive one.
But that's exactly how it came across. If you thought you knew the music, this was like hearing it completely anew.
Thorny academic issues of pitch, tempo, instrumentation and liturgical rectitude, which have made this work so problematic in the recent past, were resolved to a point where the performers could give their musicianship free rein.
The band was formed by members of In Stil Moderno plus two cornettists and a six-man continuo division that constantly adapted itself to the music's ever-changing exigencies.
Despite the odd stray sibilant (and one wayward plainsong antiphon), the 16-strong choir equalled the prompt attack, certain rhythm, unanimous expression, and - best of all - pristine intonation of the instrumentalists.
In the bass and short tenor solos, three choristers held their own against principal soloists Anne Grimm and Katharine Fuge (sopranos), and Charles Daniels and James Gilchrist (tenors).
These four artists all seemed uncannily well-suited to the exacting and very particular demands of their parts. Fuge's delicate phrasing was an entirely apt foil to Grimm's more overtly expressive fioratura, while the tenors, no less aptly, sang like a pair of identical twins.
Perhaps, then, it would be invidious to single out Daniels's limpid solo, Nigra sum, where every last detail of the copious ornamentation seemed to form an absolutely essential component in the composer's shatteringly expressive rhetoric.
Yet this wasn't so much a high point as a marker of just how revelatory the whole performance was turning out to be.
So revelatory, in fact, that you could have been forgiven for thinking not just that van Nevel and his team had discovered the only true interpretation of the music, but that Monteverdi had discovered the only true music for the words - momentarily, even, the only music that could possibly be worth listening to.
Performances don't come better than that.
Andrew Johnstone
Michael Alcorn, SARC
John Field Room, NCH, Dublin
For the third concert of the NCH Composers' Choice series, Michael Alcorn joined forces with Maltese percussionist Renzo Spiteri and digital artist Pedro Rebelo - both colleagues from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast - in an hour-long programme entitled Found Objects and Live Electronics.
The objects referred to are the salvaged items of scrap metal and plastic that Spiteri uses as instruments, in a heightened application of the principle that anything hollow produces a variety of characteristic sounds if you hit it in the right places.
Spiteri's own solos, Sketch I and Sketch IV, which deployed an impressive technique similar to bodhrán playing, and Alcorn's Parallax, for an official drum-kit with digital delay, had a concentrated metricality that contrasted effectively with the other items.
Rust, a new work by Rebelo for digitally enhanced percussion and taped fragments, was played - its title notwithstanding - on a non-ferrous object. The resulting timbres, obtained with drumstick and violin bow, were combined with what sounded like snatches of African song and some perhaps intentional feedback.
The faint suggestions of melody and accompaniment that were perceptible in Alcorn's Thin Air were studiously avoided in his much more severe Deconstructions in Metal I and II.
These items gave the impression that, although developments in digital hardware and software provide electronic musicians with ever-increasing convenience and flexibility, the range of sonic and syntactical resources they use changes little from decade to decade.
The concert also included two non-live, prizewinning works by SARC composers: Gordon Delap's flickering audiovisual study, Body Light Corpuscles, and Jason Geistweidt's engaging sound-speech collage, Letter from the Trenches.
Andrew Johnstone
