Reviews looks at the Sligo New Music Day, the International Puppet Festival in Dún Laoghaire and Bygones as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival
Sligo New Music Day
Presbyterian Church and St Anne's Youth Centre,
Sligo
The Model and Niland Gallery, home to the Sligo New Music Festival, is closed for refurbishment. The gallery is still active, however, running offsite programmes, and last weekend the new music festival was compacted into half a day, for three concerts focusing on the work of two men whose work has been little heard in Ireland: Dutch composer Jacob TV (also known as Jacob Ter Veldhuis) and the Romanian-born French composer, Horatiu Radulescu.
Jacob TV (born 1951) describes himself as an "avant pop composer" who is "preoccupied with American media and world events and draws raw material from those sources". The works of his heard in Sligo were at the forefront of one of the day's obsessions, the combination of speech and music. Two of the three pieces were performed by Amsterdam's Amstel Saxophone Quartet.
Jacob TV likes to chop up recorded speech (anything from television advertisements, documentaries and television talk-shows to a street preacher) and recombine the fragments into sharp rhythmic patterns for instrumentalists to compete with.
The technique of pairing speech in this way with music is probably now best known from Steve Reich's Different Trains. Reich reflected on the different trains of his youth (in the US and Germany of the 1940s), using everyday speech to open up windows into deeply uncomfortable worlds.
Jacob TV, on the other hand, takes explicitly uncomfortable material, such as emotional conflicts and rages, and creates a poppy background, effectively disinfecting the original import of most of what he's processing. The one exception was Grab it, for tenor saxophone and ghettoblaster, where the repeat count of the word "motherf**ker" exceeded any other 10 minutes of my life.
Cathal Roche's The Messagetakes a single text spoken in different accents and tracks the musical shape of the speech with saxophone. There's a workable idea there, but, having set it up, all Roche does is repeat it, again and again and again.
His collaboration with Ian Wilson, Boom!, is more portentous, creating a collage of snippets from news bulletins as a background for ruminations on saxophone. Any one of the actual bulletins would have had more interest. The collage itself offered all the proverbial fascination of watching paint dry.
Pianist Maria McGarry played two sonatas by Radulescu, the Second, subtitled being and non-being create each other, from 1991, the Fourth, subtitled like a well . . . older than God, from 1993. Radulescu was born in Bucharest in 1942, has been living in Paris since 1969 and became a French citizen in 1974. He is one of contemporary music's most radical voices, a spectralist who's got nothing to do with French spectralism, and for much of the two sonatas McGarry played, he offers the decay of violently produced sounds as material for reflection. McGarry took a milder approach to the music than Radulescu specialist Ortwin Stürmer, who has played this music here in the past. And she also brought a relatively gentle touch to a Stockhausen classic, his Piano Piece No 9.
McGarry was also heard with the Amstel Saxophone Quartet in the premiere of Siobhán Cleary's Conachlann, an essay in blunt contrasts, in which the gestures sound uncomfortably one-dimensional. The best of the saxophone quartet music came from the east and the south, in Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür's touching Lamentatio, and Italian Franco Donatoni's hypnotically susurrating Rasch. MICHAEL DERVAN
International Puppet Festival
Dún Laoghaire
The mix in the 15th Puppet Festival Ireland was special. The international platform on which it was based included some of the world's best puppeteers, with American Phillip Huber's Suspended Animation, at the Pavilion Theatre, in the lead. Verisimilitude is a big word for small puppets, but it is the right fit for the Huber cast of marionettes.
First on was a dainty trapeze artiste whose exploits were so convincing as to make the audience gasp with apprehension, followed by other acts from the circus tradition, realistic beyond belief. Old-time vaudeville had a swinging outing from a busty diva type and from a Liza Minnelli lookalike - the portraits of celebrities were wholly persuasive. The blend was eclectic, including a bashful panda on roller skates, and the succession of vignettes was driven with an irresistible comic momentum.
Huber himself, a looming figure in black, at times became directly involved as a performer with his own creations, always with grace and rhythmic purpose. His puppet cabaret is a gem in the crown of an art form that contains the stuff of permanence.
Most of the festival shows were offered in the atmospheric Lambert Theatre in Monkstown, one being Diva, by Sophie Krog from Denmark. This was a surreal piece mounted in a circular theatre which rotated to expose several locations at different levels. Within these moved the eponymous large lady, unsettled by a large rodent, a mad scientist and others on a night when her performance came unstuck.
The solo puppeteer manipulated all the characters and engineered all the manic movement in seven scenes of action. True, the plot tended to get lost in all this virtuosity, but the skills with which Krog kept everything in motion were impressive and laughter-inducing. GERRY COLGAN
DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL
Bygones*****
Project Upstairs
There was an air of quiet assurance from the start. Two male dancers, both unexpectedly and conservatively attired in suits, loped into lyric movement and were soon joined by two female performers to create a satisfying work by Norwegian choreographer Ingun Bjørnsgaard, which explored memory and experience. Past incidents and core emotions were subtly traced by this talented ensemble as they peeled away layers of clothes or movement to get down to basics.
They danced and challenged each other, a blend of classic and contemporary style, counterpointed by the on-stage musician who plucked and sawed guitars or manipulated electronics to create a finely attuned soundscape. In some sequences of physical contact, it was a case of interruptive dance; nudging, elbowing and shoving. In others, it was flowing and lyrical. Show concluded SEONA MAC RÉAMOINN
