The Crash Ensemble has established something of a reputation not just for selling out their concerts, but for having to turn people away on the night. The group's first appearance in the John Field Room on Sunday ran true to form in that regard.
The inclusion in the programme of two works by Michael Gordon is an acknowledgement of Crash's debt to the ensemble with which Gordon is most closely associated, New York's Bang on a Can All-Stars. As a composer, Gordon's Yo! Shakespeare and Industry both show good basic ideas, but not the means of translating those ideas into interesting pieces.
It's a point that could be made about many of the pieces in Sunday's programme. Andrew Synnott's No need for fingers for player piano (the title means what it says) lags far behind Conlon Nancarrow's four-decade-old Boogie-Woogie Study in its exploitation of the unique resources of the player piano. Nancarrow always loses when transcribed for actual fingers to play. No need for fingers sounded as if it needed the expressive contouring that only human fingers could supply. The point of Isak Goldschneider's Four Eyes, for prepared harpsichord and amplified double bass, quite eluded me. Perhaps there was a theatrical message in the beating of the air with the bow and the intermittent struggle of the harpsichord that wasn't apparent from the back of the venue. The 1960s chic of Cathy Berberian's comic-strip Stripsody would be difficult to bring off today, even for the great lady herself, were she still around to do it. Stephie Buttrich did everything the piece asks of her, and yet it sat uncomfortably, not funny, touching, or thought-provoking.
The Knabenduett for two clarinets from Stockhausen's Donnerstag aus Licht and Nancarrow's Boogie-Woogie Study showed two contrasted extremes of linear writing, the one in the soft and rather kitschy mode that seems to permeate much of Stockhausen's work from the late 1970s onwards, the other in the brilliant, brittle, rhythmically intricate style Nancarrow concluded only player pianos could reliably deliver him.
Louis Andriessen's spaced-out Disco for violin and piano is a piece that seemed in need of being concertinad. The event-rate somehow missed achieving critical mass. James Eadie and Eddie Breslin's RGB came up with the idea of a mechanical, or rather electronic, form of synaesthesia, postulating a feedback mechanism for the relationship between sound and colour. It was short enough that I hadn't quite managed the feedback between programme note and experience by the time it was over.
Donnacha Dennehy's vividly punchy Junk Box Fraud, with vocalists Stephie Buttrich and Natasha Lohan, seemed a recklessly rich undertaking in the context of an evening where the musical pickings were largely slim.
