A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics
NCC/Hillier
National Gallery, Dublin
Macfarren – Seven Shakespeare Songs. Andrew Hamilton – Everything is Ridiculous. Gavin Bryars – Glorious Hill. Ezequiel Viñao – Beowulf, Scyld’s Burial. Howard Skempton – The Flight of Song.
The composition of 20 operas and nine symphonies, not to mention an eminent position in the musical life of Victorian England, have not been enough to preserve the work of George Alexander Macfarren (1813-87) from obscurity.
Paul Hillier, artistic director of the National Chamber Choir, is now on the case, however.
He has published Macfarren’s Seven Shakespeare Songs in his Theatre of Voices Edition, and brought the songs to Irish audiences during the Cork International Choral Festival in May, and to Dublin on Thursday.
The songs, written in the early 1860s, are musically well-turned, of the kind where skill triumphs over imaginative spark.
That’s not the kind of balance that works well with words by Shakespeare.
It’s the sort of music that’s probably much more fun to sing than to listen to.
Andrew Hamilton's Everything is Ridiculous, one of this year's Cork Choral Festival commissions, sounds anything but easy.
The piece is a tribute to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89), sparked by his remark on receiving a national prize, that everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death.
Hamilton’s setting derives from a chorale the composer wrote in 2008, and which he has treated so that “the rhythm is always being manipulated so that it ends up as a machine that is constantly being destroyed by human intervention”.
Think of the locked repetitions of a CD that sticks – Hamilton gorges on some exotic hiccuping effects – and then imagine the repetitions extending by slowly accumulating slivers of fresh material and you’ll have some idea of the process.
It’s a strangely exciting work, which Hamilton has kept brief and to the point.
Hamilton was born in 1977. The second of this year’s Cork commissions came from a much older composer, Argentinian Ezequiel Viñao, who was born in 1960.
His Scyld's Burialis a setting of part of Beowulf, for voices and four percussionists. The musical manner seems intended to evoke some kind of medieval ritual, a ritual which was so stretched out that it might need the input of some heavy intoxicant to make its insistent repetitiveness seem meaningful.
Works by two living English composers, both in their 60s, completed the programme.
Gavin Bryars's Glorious Hill(1988) is named after the small-town Mississippi setting of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, a play with a scene which impressed Bryars for the strength of its argument about human choice.
The actual text for Glorious Hill,however, is from Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. Bryars treats the words of God addressing Adam, sung in Latin, with spare, hieratic dignity.
The Longfellow settings of Howard Skempton's The Flight of Song(1996) are by comparison lushly indulgent, moving from the whispered air sounds of the opening, into a world of imaginative harmonic wizardry. Yet at the same time the whole work – four poems set without a break – sounds compact, economical, perfectly formed.
The members of the NCC, working with the unusual number of 14 voices, sang with their usual well-polished finish, save in the Bryars, where signs of strain were apparent. MICHAEL DERVAN
Songs from the Beautiful City
Firkin Crane, Cork
If there's only one air for a ballad, Jimmy Crowley can sing them all. Or so it seems, judging by his performance in Songs from the Beautiful Cityat the Firkin Crane, where he has gathered a bundle of traditional and local material into a celebration of ethnicity.
It’s not his ethnicity, but if his northside identity as songster and folklorist is adopted it seems to have been a reciprocal arrangement.
Shelved into the semi-circular design of the Musgrave Theatre, his audience is both knowing and affectionate, singing along where possible, and sometimes where not, and interjecting colloquialisms when a particular chord is struck.
Which is often, for this is a very deliberate appeal to identification although the inclusion of a glossary in the programme (jag, skelp, mockeyah) suggests an attempt to reach alien, even southside, ears.
They might have to be tin ears for anyone unlikely to be seduced by the linking material written by Crowley, whose narration avoids any musical development even though invoking the names of songwriters and subjects.
Although in fine voice and as skilful as ever in his playing (bouzouki, mouth organ and guitar) Crowley fails to put anything other than emotional shape on this piece, rambling around the playing area where Liza Zagone’s design of casks and cradles incorporates a video screen to which he gestures frequently but unnecessarily.
The singer’s gentle familiarity is dangerous as it offers his listeners a chance to take control.
While bolstered by such favourites as The Armoured Car, The Boys of Fairhill, I Know My Loveand Salonikathere's no doubt but that Crowley doesn't so much carry a tune as break it up into phrases, shrinking the melodic line and taking it all away to some personal destination.
That distance which distinguishes the artist from his hearers is diluted by the weakness of both material and production (by Crowley and the Firkin Crane) and as such lost words as fairin and such vanished people as Hadji Bey remind us of what has disappeared along with the green hills of Cork. The feeling is that this was an opportunity misunderstood rather than missed. MARY LELAND
Wednesdays and Thursdays throughout the summer
Anúna,
RTÉ NSO/Maloney NCH, Dublin
Michael McGlynn, founder of the cult Irish choral group Anúna, had some propitious things to say in advance of its belated debut with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.
The plan, he explained in interview at the Contemporary Music Centre, was to use his singers “in the context” of the NSO. Chiefly, this would be McGlynn’s “opportunity to shine as a composer for orchestra”.
Events proved otherwise. With conductor Gavin Maloney and his players sitting out for more than one item in three, and having only a handful of pieces to themselves, the evening was decisively Anúna’s.
Not being short on an instrumental back catalogue, McGlynn had taken the chance to dust off a couple of numbers from his 2007 cantata St Francis, a selection from his 2003 Silver Rivercompilation for oboist Matthew Manning, and nine tracks from the Anúna-Ulster Orchestra album of the same year, Behind the Closed Eye.
As McGlynn was quick to point out, those projects had been for smaller forces than the NSO, and some of the material had now been specially beefed-up to full symphonic size.
The re-instrumentation was at its most effective in the succinctly Whelanesque jig The Coming of Winter, conceived in 1984 as a study for trumpet and piano.
In Twilight,however, the relationship between the original strings and the supplemented winds stretched harmonic credibility too far.
Fortunately, with Anúna at full strength and taking the lion’s share of the programme, there was plenty to remind the audience of McGlynn’s idiosyncratic genius for unaccompanied choral timbres.
With the possible exception of the charming and unfamiliar The White Rose, the a cappellacontributions dated from the early-to- mid '90s, and were delivered with the Procrustean insipidity that is this extraordinary group's enduring trademark. ANDREW JOHNSTONE
