The Naked Flame (exc) - Seoirse Bodley
I Am Wind On Sea - John Buckley
Carta Irlandesa - Seoirse Bodley
The Bank of Ireland "Mostly Modern" series featured an all-Irish programme at lunchtime last Thursday. Aylish Kerrigan (mezzo soprano) sang two sets of songs by Seoirse Bodley, with the composer as pianist, plus a work for solo voice by John Buckley.
This concert left the impression of performances faithful to the composers' wishes. It was Aylish Kerrigan who gave the first performances of the Buckley and of the second Bodley work, and her singing had the confidence that comes from having something welltucked under one's belt. This was despite a sometimes troublesome tendency to produce a hard, tight sound, especially when striving for intensity.
The concert opened with four songs from Bodley's The Naked Flame, settings of poems by Micheal O Siadhail, and closed with his Carta Irlandesa, to Spanish texts by Antonio Gonzales-Guerrero. The first piece's free chromaticism has its roots in 20th-century pastoralism, while the second is more wide-ranging and, taking its cue from the poems, based on the experiences of a survivor of the Spanish Armada wrecks, is far more dramatic. Both settings show this composer's characteristic declamatory methods. They involve little or no text repetition and show detailed attention to the timing and stress of words. It is as if a reading were being intensified by music.
John Buckley's I Am Wind On Sea explores the composer's translation of Aimhirgin's text for the sonority of the words as well as for their meaning. Buckley's calculated fragmentation of words no longer sounds radical. Nevertheless, the piece has a distinctive, ritualistic quality, which makes the text seem a cipher for ancient ideas.