If there's a single quality that marks the music of Gerald Barry out from that of other Irish composers, it's its vitality. Well, not quite. It's both its vitality and daring. And the concert that made this most clear during the Lyric FM Gerald Barry Festival, which ended on Sunday, was Thursday's programme from the National Chamber Choir under Simon Joly.
The National Chamber Choir under its current artistic director, Colin Mawby, has not shown much interest in new music that's actually got anything new to offer. But, under the dynamic direction of Simon Joly, the singers warmed to the novelty of Barry's choral writing with apparent enthusiasm.
Barry has a reputation for demanding the well-nigh impossible from performers. Given that there's a lot of music around which is far more technically demanding than his, the reputation might seem hard to justify. Not at all. Barry writes in a way that mercilessly exposes fudging and smudging of detail. In this he's rather like Mozart. There's simply nowhere for a performer to hide.
On top of this, he frequently expects performers to function with machine-like precision at extremes, typically when pressed to the edge of their range and to the border of their endurance.
On the face of it, then, he would seem a dangerous man to let loose to write a choral work of any sort. But the choral challenge seems to have found him with the brightest of twinkles in his eye. He can write a simple carol. He can make a major event out of an alternation of just two notes, G and B (his initials) at the start of The Coming of Winter, rocketing the voices through the text at breakneck speed before, literally, attacking the text backwards, and eventually rounding the piece off with the word dloc ("cold" backwards), set as a series of isolated drops.
O Lord, How Vain has something of the ritualised austerity of Stravinsky's late choral works, but it's broken up by strangely haunting interludes of whistling. The Ring, premiered in Cork in 1996 by the Butter Exchange Brass and Reed Band, the Airport Singers and the Bells of Shandon, was inspired by the composer's experiences in Cologne during carnival time. Even in an indoor performance for two clarinets, piano duet, drums and tubular bells, the piece has an earthy directness. And it's tunefully catchy, too, though with a twist.
As a major retrospective, the Barry Festival included early and late works. At one end were three fairy-tale theatre pieces from the late 1970s - pointed moments, some short, some oblique - and Things That Gain by Being Painted from 1978, a sharp-witted treatment of the 10th-century The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, heard again, as at its premiere, with Beth Griffiths' laid-back spoken delivery and devastatingly precise vocalism. At the other were 1998 for violin and piano (a first performance) and Wiener Blut, fresh from its premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival.
1998 is a single-idea piece: dry, strangely abstract, like something that has been distilled or desiccated beyond recognition. A first hearing in an extremely dedicated performance by Marc Sabat and Stephen Clarke suggested this is not a piece that's going to win friends easily. Even the composer, in a public interview with Kevin Volans, revealed that his mind had wandered during the 21 minutes of the premiere, and his idea that it was a work to be treated like a painting - sampled at will, different moments attended to on different occasions - seemed unconvincing.
Wiener Blut for mixed ensemble (the very impressive Birmingham Contemporary Music Group making their Irish debut under Rumon Gamba) is a piece with a more yielding and generous slant on what may be the composer's pursuit of a philosopher's stone that will allow him to narrow his material and intensify its effect. It's not for nothing, after all, that he's spent so much time writing music which can function in a myriad of guises (1998 already has three). Happily, Wiener Bluteschews the ascetic aesthetic of 1998, and, since it's a later piece, may mean that the composer has already mastered the dilemma that 1998 appears to present.
Earlier this month, Noriko Kawai found her playing of two of Barry's works for solo piano swallowed up by the acoustic of the Ulster Hall in Belfast. At the Rotunda Pillar Room on Sunday, when she played the complete piano solo music in conjunction with Scriabin, the sound was full and rich, the music pure and clear. Kawai gives her all to this music: the plucked-at chords of the opening of Sur les pointes, the demented scales of Au milieu, the extraordinary leaping chords of a solo derived from Things That Gain by Being Painted.
She also performed Pavel Nersessian in the two-piano work Five Chorales from The Intelligence Park. Nersessian is perhaps the only pianist I've heard playing Barry's music (he played Triorchic Blues in the 1991 Dublin International Piano Competition) who manages to make it sound, well, not exactly easy, but fully controllable. He doesn't seem to mind how the notes are spattered around the keyboard; he reaches them all with a pianola-like accuracy which is tremendously exciting to witness. Let's hope the festival experience encourages him to explore the rest of the composer's piano music and bring it before the Irish public.
As will be clear to anybody who went to the well-attended concerts, the Barry Festival was in most regards a resounding success - the exceptions were the public interview with Kevin Volans (sadly, not firmly directed), and the programme book (interesting notes by Ivan Hewitt in a pamphlet that was both mean in appearance and hard to read in concert-hall lighting.) Voices are already clamouring for a repeat on an annual basis, and they will be hard to resist.
Barry is a singular figure in more ways than one, and no other Irish composer springs to mind who carries the same aura of excitement and originality or whose music means so much to such a wide range of listeners. Certainly, there has been no Irish premiere that has made the impression of The Conquest of Ireland (heard in the festival's opening concert las Wednesday) since Barry's opera The Intelligence Park was seen at the Gate Theatre in 1990. That would seem to indicate that if RTE and Lyric FM want to showcase the work of another contemporary composer, they'll have to look abroad for a fresh candidate - and nothing could be more apt as a way of re-connecting Ireland's musical life to the European and international mainstream.
