Today reviews looks at Music 21 in the John Field Room and Kraggerud, and the RTÉ NSO/Markson at the NCH, Dublin
Music 21
NCH John Field Room,
Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
THE MUSIC series, Music 21, presented two concerts on Friday. Lunchtime at the NCH John Field Room was devoted to the guitar music of French composer Maurice Ohana (1913-92). The evening was split between Roger Doyle's improvising ensemble, General Practice, and a bells-and-whistles Cellotronicum programme from Polish cellist Andrzej Bauer.
Bauer devised his Cellotronicum for the 2002 Warsaw Autumn Festival, bringing together a collection of works for cello and electronics with the intention of highlighting the avenues opened up by harnessing modern technology to develop the sound world of his own instrument.
Combining a solo instrument with electronic sounds is of course anything but a new idea. The earliest pieces of this kind were written back in the early 1950s. But nowadays the electronic component is provided not by a bulky tape recorder, but usually a laptop computer.
The tone of Bauer's programme was mostly that of a child-in-a-toyshop exploration, composers reflecting aspects of the cello's sound world in the electronic domain (bouncing bow sounds imitated in Slawomir Kupczak Anafora V), everything bar the kitchen sink taken as raw material, including the cello as a table for tapping and finger-drumming (Michal Talma-Sutt's seriously overlong Cellotronicum), and a single venture into pop music style hyperactivity (Jacek Grudzien's Ad Naan).
Just one work went in the direction of simplicity, Japanese composer Karen Tanaka's The Song of Songs, which set the romantic urges of a slow cello melody against a background of new age haloes and tinkles. It was the one work which gave the feeling of not having been unduly distracted by the technical possibilities that Bauer is so keen to open up.
The biggest problem I had with the evening actually had very little to do with the music. The amplification of Bauer's own cello introduced such changes to the timbre of the instrument that, in terms of tone colour, all those years he spent at the conservatory - and that the maker of his instrument spent learning the craft - went for very little indeed.
This is an elephant in the room that, I suspect, exponents of amplified are going to have to deal with sooner or later. In expanding the cello's range, Bauer has ditched the very bits of its sound history that people treasure it so much for. The free improvisations (according to the advance publicity) or prepared improvisations (as announced from the stage) of Roger Doyle (keyboard) and Keith O'Brien (electric guitar and Keith O'Brien) were surprisingly dull. And Doyle's 1995 Under the Green Time, touted by Music 21's director Benjamin Dwyer as the composer's masterpiece, still sounds to me as a super-naive juxtaposition of uilleann pipes and industrial strength electronics.
Earlier in the day, at the NCH John Field Room, guitarist Stephan Schmidt offered performances of the complete guitar works of Casablanca-born Ohana, played on the 10-stringed instrument which the composer favoured for the exploration of some fascinating sonorities. MICHAEL DERVAN
Kraggerud,
RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
Shostakovich - Ballet Suite No.1 Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto
Stravinsky - The Fairy's Kiss Tchaikovsky - Sleeping Beauty Suite
Friday's concert was officially part of Culture Night, when cultural venues in five cities across Ireland put on special events and offered free admission.
At the National Concert Hall, tickets were free but the programme was fairly routine. And no bad thing, since no first-timers who took the opportunity to give classical music a go could end up feeling short-changed or patronised by a "special" programme. And since half the programme was a bit on the obscure side, there was a level playing-field for aficionados and uninitiated alike.
In the event most of us could have done with a little help.
Shostakovich's ballet suites - extracts from early theatre scores assembled into apparently lightweight suites by his friend Levon Atovmian - are shot through with a subversive musical in-joke: a satirical slant on the pop music of the day.
Principal conductor Gerhard Markson did speak before the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto which he suggested was one of the greatest of all romantic concertos. Hopefully this was evident to newcomers. Even in this performance - in which the exciting Henning Kraggerud exuded both passion and technique - the emotional power of Tchaikovsky at full tilt was palpable.
It was all ballet music after the interval, starting with Stravinsky's Divertimento, Petrushkameets The Nutcrackerin a homage to Tchaikovsky rescued from Stravinsky's unsuccessful ballet The Fairy's Kiss. It featured fine solos for cello, clarinet, flute and harp. In the final work, Markson loosed his earlier restraint for the suite from The Sleeping Beauty. MICHAEL DUNGAN
