Composers' Ink is a collective representing just five composers, Raymond Deane, Donnacha Dennehy, Roger Doyle, Benjamin Dwyer and Fergus Johnston. With a sold-out Crash Ensemble concert on Saturday evening in project @ the mint, and lunchtimes with various performers at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre and the Hugh Lane Gallery, this past weekend's foray into joint concert promotion - their first - paid off handsomely.
Doyle (b1949) takes a delight in juxtapositions by which he might hope to surprise, startle or shock. These could be felt in the I'm-such-a-bold-boy skips, sidesteps and momentary clashes of the early, Satie-goes-primitive piano solo, Bitter-Sweet Suite, as clearly as in Under the Green Time, placing the uilleann pipes in unequal combat with a punchily-driven electronic soundtrack.
There's a rich fantasy underlying his idea of composing the output of an invented radio station, KBBL, within the Babel project. Sadly, it's all as banal as what you can get by turning the dial in the comfort of your own home. On second hearing, the mixed quartet, Shindstu, sounded paler than at its premiere in Kilkenny last month.
Deane (b1953) often seems to settle on gestures he finds so eidetic they will not fade, but must be repeatedly returned to until the ritual of repetition or reshaping somehow occasions the moment of departure or release. Avatars for solo piano showed him at his densest. The North African-inspired Moresque, for oboe and percussion, was more overtly picturesque, and Mutatis Mutandis, for solo flute (from the late 1970s but only now being premiered), brought theatricality and a witty closing gesture.
Like Deane, whose The Seagull dreams of its Shadow was written for a 10-year-old niece, Johnston (b1959) included work of apparent simplicity through the imagery of flight and flutter in Opus Lepidopterae. His fondness for Ligetian pattern-making is expressed in the surge and fade of Only If for amplified, honking bass clarinet and tape, and in a short piano study that lies dangerously close to its model.
Dwyer (b1965) is more direct in strategy and emotion. His Lorca-inspired Soneto del Amor Oscuro, for oboe and percussion, suffered from some tentativeness from oboist Matthew Manning, but Parall axis for taped saxophones explores with directness a neglected intersection of acoustic and electronic worlds. Four guitar Etudes, solidly in the tradition of the performing composer, won a rousing reception.
Dennehy (b1970) moves from street-wise cheek to high intellectual demands in pieces that cross media divides and celebrate things urban and popular. Voitures for oboe and tape and Metropolis Mutabilis for tape and video (Hugh Reynolds and Gerry O'Brien) represented the urban, down to making music out of street noises. Two piano Begobs were more conventionally strenuous (but by no means unwitty), and Swerve for flute and tape reflected a more popular tone.
