Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events
Remembering LigetiLiberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
The Remembering Ligeti Festival at Dublin's Liberty Hall Theatre last weekend celebrated the work of György Ligeti, one of the leading composers of our time through a focus on his smaller scale works.
The notable exception was the opening performance of the Poèmesymphonique. This piece offers an experience unlike anything its title seems to suggest. It's easy to imagine the composer, were he still alive, being amused at the assembled audience waiting patiently in the foyer through speech after speech before making their way into the auditorium for a piece created by the ticking of 100 metronomes, the work terminating only when the last one has unwound. At this stage, it hardly matters whether Ligeti intended this Fluxus-inspired jeu d'esprit to be taken with total seriousness or not.
The ticking mass creates a complex web of patterns which shift against one another, so that, periodically, out of the hubbub, clear pulses emerge, like the single voice that momentarily soars over all others at a noisy party. The masses and meta patterns involved were effects that the composer would return to again and again, most unexpectedly in the series of Étudesfor piano he produced from 1985 onwards.
The Études, which are already filtering into the regular repertoire, were played in their entirety by Ian Pace. I'm not sure that such a comprehensive presentation is the best way to hear them, any more than it would be, save in exceptional circumstances, with any extended set of studies, even those by Chopin and Liszt.
Saturday's lunchtime concert included two early pieces from 1953, the Sonata for Solo Cello, which William Butt presented as a late romantic treasure, and Musica ricercata for piano, whose strict and fascinating self-imposed limitations of pitch material Dermot Dunne translated with persuasive skill to the accordion. The 1958 electronic work, Artikulation, is still futuristic sounding in a way that attaches it to the space-age concerns of the time in which it was written. And the three solo harpsichord works, Continuum(1968), Passacaglia unghereseand Hungarian Rock(both 1978) show that intense focus on clear processes with attractively quirky outcomes that mark the Études. It was a pity that David Adams's performances were subjected to such a level of low-quality amplification that the natural brilliance of the harpsichord was seriously muted, and the direct sound from the instrument was dominated by the sound from the loudspeakers.
The festival ran to screenings of the Kubrick films which used Ligeti's music, and a number of symposiums presenting papers on the composer's work, none of which I was able to attend. The last of the concerts I made it to, on Saturday night, included two works for wind quintet, the popular Six Bagatelles(reworking parts of Musica ricercata) and the Ten Piecesin robust performances from LigetiWinds, and the late Sonata for Viola Solo, in which Ralf Ehlers's playing suffered from the dryness of the acoustic.
The Arditti Quartet played the First Quartet Métamorphosesnocturnes of 1954 with a mesmerising intensity of gesture. The composer himself has called this " 'prehistoric' Ligeti". The Ardittis made clear the rootedness in the past which prompted that description, while conveying at the same time a potent vein of prophecy for the future. Michael Dervan
Someone Who'll Watch Over MeLyric Theatre, Belfast
"Will we ever get out of here?" "What is it all for?" Spoken or unspoken, these are the questions that dominate the interminable waking and sleeping hours of three men, shackled to a peeling wall in one of the worst places on earth. Irish journalist Edward, American doctor Adam and English university lecturer Michael had been leading professional lives in different orbits, until they were snatched from the streets of Beirut and held hostage together for years on end.
Andrew Flynn's production for Galway's Decadent Theatre, revived here in co-production with the Lyric, vividly evokes real-life images, which were so current at the time of the play's creation in 1992 and have, again, been forced upon our collective consciousness in particularly horrifying circumstances.
Given the unprepossessing setting and narrow focus, it demands writing of unusual accomplishment to sustain drama and tension throughout a fictionalised storyline with which audiences are so familiar. But this play sees Frank McGuinness at the very top of his form, extracting from the depths of the human condition uncrushable determination, passion and compassion, anger and jealousy, spite and fear, and lashings of black, subversive humour.
Diarmuid de Faoite's Edward bears a disconcerting physical and vocal resemblance to Brian Keenan, on whose plight the play was based. He has perfected that chippy, probing, intrusive Belfast manner, that can both cheer and infuriate. After months in his company, Paul Roe's sweet, fragile Adam has got to grips with him and each has become the perfect foil to the other.
But the arrival of Rod Goodall's bookish, sanctimonious Englishman throws their partnership into freefall as the three must now learn to love one another.
Owen McCarthaigh's gloomy set offers no chink of respite, except through a high slatted door, behind which sinister armed presences watch and wait. Mind games and word games are the only means of retaining sanity and of convincing each man that he is still alive by virtue of his ability to feel something, anything.
The final goodbye, with its historical overtones, brings an emotionally draining conclusion to this absorbing revival of a towering - and sadly, still topical - play.
Runs until Friday, then at the Half Moon Theatre, Cork from Nov 19 to Dec 1 Jane Coyle
IBO Chamber SoloistsThe Venue, Ratoath, Co Meath
You could reasonably argue that the Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists might have programmed Bach's Air on a G Stringet al for their current Music Network mini-tour that includes small, off-the-beaten-path and baroque-deprived venues in Ratoath and Tipperary.
But it was great that they didn't. The making of this programme was the name and quality of Monica Huggett - the world- class baroque violinist and director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra - and the matching calibre of the four, all-Irish IBO Chamber Soloists she brought with her on this tour. Organist and harpsichord player Malcolm Proud is Ireland's foremost native-born baroque specialist.
Claire Duff (violin), Sarah McMahon (cello) and Richard Sweeney (theorbo) are all young, fully established and successful players on the international scene, performing with leading London-based specialist ensembles such as the King's Consort and the Academy of Ancient Music.
And they didn't play the Air on a G String, turning away from well-known late Baroque favourites such as Bach and Handel in order to focus on the heart of the 17th century and its lower-profile names. Who better to champion these, whether in Ireland's cities or off-the-beaten-path, than this ensemble?
That was the response in Ratoath, where the audience seemed to warm immediately to the dancing, interweaving lines in fast movements and the searing, emotionally affective slow movements of canzonas and sonatas by Frescobaldi, Legrenzi, Picchi, Colista and Matthew Locke (whom Huggett introduced as the English Restoration's Beethoven) among others.
The sound quality, precision and shaping of the string playing was outstanding, even in the kind of unyielding and music- unfriendly acoustic that Ratoath's The Venuehas in common with so many local arts centres built in recent years. In other ways the space was well suited to chamber music: intimate, welcoming and comfortable. The audience might well have doubled with more determined local advertising.
Despite gently deprecating introductions by the London-born Huggett, like a mother masking her pride in a child, one composer ended up standing out from the rest. This was the Englishman Henry Purcell who, in two trio sonatas, demonstrated greater beauty and sophistication and a subtler yet stronger power to stir the heart than the Italians who were his models. Michael Dungan
Skride, RTÉ NSO/KalmarNCH, Dublin
John Adams - The Chairman Dances. Bartók - Violin Concerto No 2. Beethoven - Symphony No 5.
You'd think that the strength and animation which visiting conductor Carlos Kalmar demonstrated in both Beethoven and Bartók would convert a doubter like myself when applied to the jogging-on-the-spot minimalism of John Adams's The Chairman Dances.
Alas no. Kalmar worked meticulously with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in Adams's discreetly shifting minimalist textures. But it still seemed to me that too few rhythmic and instrumental ideas (albeit good ones) are too thinly spread.
In fairness to Adams, it's a piece removed from its proper context in his 1986 opera Nixon in China where it complements the action. This isn't music that's meant to engage the human ear and mind on its own merits.
As do both Beethoven and Bartók. The young Latvian soloist Baiba Skride played with scads of lyricism and pure gutsiness in Bartók's Violin Concerto No 2, a work that moves suddenly yet seamlessly between both. To this add an utterly fluent and extroverted virtuosity - most obviously in the first movement cadenza but in many other places besides - and you have a really first-rate performance of one of the 20th century's greatest concertos.
Kalmar did a fine job of keeping Skride's solo voice to the forefront while never losing any of the force of Bartók's often brawny orchestral writing.
Brawn and power were also the chief characteristics of Kalmar's approach to Beethoven's Symphony No 5, certainly in the dramatic first movement. While his tempo was a standard one, he elected not to delay - which the score allows for - after each statement of that supremely famous rhythmic motif. This single exercising of discretion gave a significant extra impulse to the forward thrust of the movement.
It set the tone for the whole work. Even after the contrasting respite of the slow second movement, the vigour and motion from that initial buzz quickly resumed, energising the mighty tread of the horns in the scherzo and unleashing the robust, all-conquering exuberance of the finale. Michael Dungan
