A selection of reviews from Irish Timeswriters
Ergodos Festival
Dublin
The Ergodos Festival ran for nine days, and was dominated by various kinds of experimental music. As the programme booklet declared, “The culture of genre is an illusion, surely . . . We celebrate music . . . that evades definition”. Well, that depends on the definition. Most of the music in the festival’s last three concerts (the previous ones were reviewed in this newspaper on Thursday) evaded definition by seeking to evade historical notions of influence and genre. Concept pieces ruled! But even if form seems infinitely fluid or absent, genre and definition are not so easily escaped. In this case there was a lot of music that explored new pitch systems, and that might be described as microtonal or spectral.
Thursday night at the Unitarian Church, St Stephen's Green, featured special tuning of string instruments. Three of the works were festival commissions. Brian Ledwidge Flynn's Zeitgeber Gearstakes some clichés of rock music, dismembers them, and subjects them to catchy, microtonal bending and glissandos. Also commissioned were Brian Bridges's Infraction,for violin, viola and guitar, and Simon O'Connor's guitar duo I remember you. Both of these, in different ways, involved an oh-so-slowly, economical interaction between instruments and electronics that held one's attention.
Multiple tunings and microtonality were also to the fore in Friday's concert by the Dutch-based group Trio Scordatura – Bob Gilmore (guitar), Elisabeth Smalt (viola) and Alfrun Schmid (voice). They played some of the most engaging music of these concerts, and produced some of the most polished persuasive playing. The singing had pinpoint accuracy of pitch, and that was all the more striking when one realised, in a beautiful performance of Partch's Lyrics by Li Po(1930-33), that Schmid was equally capable when singing with or without vibrato.
It was apt that the oldest piece of the festival should be by Partch, for he was a pioneer in definition-busting. The instruments heard included the adapted viola, an extra-rich and versatile invention of that composer. It appeared in this concert's festival commission, Judith Ring's . . . hush, where it subtly discoursed with pre-recorded electronics. Other pieces included the meticulously microtonal Enclosures(2008) by Peter Adriaansz, Radulescu's astonishing display of spectral techniques, Intimate Rituals XI(2003 – I'd travel to hear the other 10!), and Alvin Lucier's I remember(1997).
The last concert was held in St Bartholomew's Church, Clyde Road, and was devoted to the late James Tenney's In a large, open space(1994). This work can last almost any length of time – 70 minutes on this occasion. The 11 players were positioned in different parts of the building, and they played precisely defined, sustained pitches so that, as you walk around the building (and that was expected) the mingling of fundamentals and overtones changes. Love it or hate it, it does what it aims to do – give the audience members liberty to create their own aural experience.
That’s where Tenney proved to be among the handful who have the edge over many others. This kind of music represents what may be some of the most important musical experiments of our times; and who knows where it will lead? But for the present, it seems clear that the most persuasive work comes from those who do one or two things with extreme concentration, who know not to clutter the ear, and who also know that in music the best intellectual concepts are
often the simplest – concepts that don't need much explanation via programme notes that, all too often, are much ado about a little. What matters most is how the music sounds. MARTIN ADAMS
Choreography for Blackboards
Great Hall, IMMA
“But was it dance?” One audience member had doubts leaving Daghdha Dance Company’s latest performance. For 90 minutes, seven people chalked memories and thoughts on to personal monolithic-like blackboards.
Perhaps the cast also created uncertainty: a journalist, various artists, one dancer and the president of the Irish Senior Citizens' Parliament instead of Daghdha's full-time dancers. While Choreography for Blackboardsmightn't be some people's idea of dance, it is faithful to the company's credo. For artistic director Michael Klien choreography isn't a set of moves reproduced when the curtain goes up, but a framework that allows the performers' authentic movement to emerge.
So Klien arms the seven performers with a structure, robust enough to prevent free-range improvisation but loose enough to allow liberal expression. Although some pictures emerge – carefully drawn landscapes with trees, boats, dogs and smiley faces – what appears on the blackboards is mostly abstract, the raw by-product of movement.
Stuttered arm movements produce sharp angled lines, nonchalant pecks congeal into pixelated textures or blocks of white are pressed from sliding lengths of chalk.
Performers John Waters, Niamh Geoghegan, Jeffrey Gormly, Joseph McGucken, Avril Tierney, Áine Stapleton and Sylvia Meehan clearly engage in the process in spite of different performing energies. Some are intensely focussed on their own drawings, while others gaze at other blackboards for a prompt for more ideas.
Throughout, the skeleton of Klien’s structure remains hidden – although it may have been revealed at the post-performance talk on opening night – and what is important is how the group revs into a collective creative hum. The promenade setting meant that the audience could observe this from different angles and proximities.
IMMA's Great Hall, however magnificent with its high ceiling and red carpet, didn't quite contain this energy in sharp focus as might a smaller tighter venue. Nevertheless the format of Choreography for Blackboardsis succinct in bringing the performers' inner life to the audience in a continuous cycle, where movement causes chalkmark causes thought causes movement. MICHAEL SEAVER
Toradze, RTÉ NSO/Buribayev
NCH, Dublin
Mussorgsky/Shostakovich– Dawn on the Moscow River. Prokofiev– Piano Concerto No 3. Shostakovich– Symphony No 10.
In this all-Russian programme from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the Prelude to Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchinawas effectively the prelude to a storm.
Mussorgsky’s folk-tune depiction of dawn on the Moscow River preceded Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, which is not by any means the most violent or percussive of the composer’s concertos. But with the Georgian-born, US-resident Alexander Toradze a daunting presence at the keyboard, what the audience got was a King Kong performance complete with extremes of musical tenderness and thuggery.
Toradze is one of those players who can give the impression of taking full control of both instrument and music. The specifics of the composer’s score seemed like raw material to be dispensed with in the interests of the moment. Dynamic markings were re-written at will.
Rubato was allowed to take the music almost to a standstill, like a switchback ride at the apex of one of its curves. Purism, whatever that might be in this particular work, was at a minimum. Pianistic excitement was the order of the day, and the thrills and spills were both mighty and plentiful.
The audience loved the spectacle. Toradze almost managed to give the impression of being a controlling cat to the Steinway’s mouse, and he obliged with encores at either extreme, a finely-spun morsel by Scarlatti, and a fearless pummelling of the finale of Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata.
The evening’s conductor, Alan Buribayev, was with Toradze all the way when it came to keeping track of his expressive manoeuverings, but proved rather less successful in striking balances that would have allowed everything his soloist was doing to be heard with ideal clarity.
In Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony Buribayev drove the music rather too hard, favouring blunt statement over any kind of suggestiveness, so that the often over-loud performance sounded almost insistently crude. MICHAEL DERVAN
Engegård Quartet
City Hall, Dublin
Beethoven– String Quartet in E flat, Op 74 (Harp). Bartók– String Quartet No 3.
In programming these two pieces, the Norwegian Engegård String Quartet invited comparisons between one composer attempting consciously to engage audiences and another stating emphatically that pursuing his artistic path over-ruled all other considerations.
With his HarpQuartet – so nicknamed because of novel, harp-like plucked arpeggios in the first movement – Beethoven was at least partially concerned with re-engaging a public who hadn't been greatly taken with the formal stringency of his three preceding quartets (the Op. 59 Rasumovsky set). So the Harpis a friendlier, warmer work while still an artistic masterpiece.
Bartók in the 1920s, meanwhile, was possibly at the furthest remove from concern for audience in his career, this clearly demonstrated in the density, abstraction and new musical language of his Third and Fourth string quartets.
These considerations, combined with the ongoing saga of City Hall’s big-bloom acoustic, made the audience response of particular interest on this occasion. Unlike the clean, penetrating quality of gut strings in last week’s concert by the baroque-instruments Trio Quattro, the modern strings of the Engegård Quartet were not well accommodated by the generous resonance of the venue. For the Beethoven it meant that the rapid and lingering accumulation of sound piled harmonies on top of each other and often rendered melodic lines – notably in the leader’s part – as all but inaudible. There was less damage at slow tempos, so the central Adagio movement afforded the best chance to hear the Engegård’s considerable qualities.
And the audience warmly acknowledged those qualities. What was interesting was how they loved the Bartók. Although if anything the more intricately wrought of the two works, and with vast amounts of detail lost to the reverb, the Bartók embodies a raw, elemental spirit of immense, ferocious strength. In the Engegård's hugely committed and spirited performance, this force surged through the acoustic morass and pounded the audience who roared their approval at the end. MICHAEL DUNGAN
