Effervescence - Maria Ryan
Electric Counterpoint - Steve Reich
Earth to Earth - Roger Doyle
Mutable Sea - Stephen Gardner
The Crash Ensemble's first appearance in Dalkey on Thursday night was by way of marking the completion of Stephen Gardner's term as composer-in-residence with Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
Mutable Sea, the second premiere of his period of residency, is very much what its title suggests, a piece inspired by the sea, "from Seapoint to the Forty Foot, from Bullock Harbour to Killiney Strand". And, Gardner's note professes, "much of this piece can be seen as a contemplation upon and celebration of the sea's awesome power".
Gardner has never been a composer to eschew directness or bluntness. But the recorded evocation of breaking waves which opens his new piece suggests he has, unusually for him, succumbed to a vein of sentimentality in painting his sea picture. To be sure, some of the textures and dissonances roughened things up, especially with the intervention of the Crash Ensemble's in-your-face amplification.
So, although the sentimentality is in an odd way more barbarous than sweet, the ultimate effect is to leave one with a feeling of uncomfortable ambivalence on Gardner's part when he considers the sea. On the other hand, it may be that the rough-hewn quality which is often to be found in his work does not respond kindly to the warts-and-all magnification process of electronic enhancement.
Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, here delivered with commanding presence by guitarist Richard Sweeney, is for me the least interesting of the composer's three essays in giddy-mirrored instrumental multiplication by means of tape. The related works for flute (Vermont Counterpoint) and clarinet (New York Counterpoint) have always seemed the more rewarding of the series.
The other two works in the programme repeated performances given recently at the Sligo Contemporary Music Festival, Earth to Earth, a newly reworked version, surprisingly dissonant, of part of Roger Doyle's Babel, and Effervescence, a slick exercise in tried-and-tested minimalism by newcomer Maria Ryan, with video projections by Noelle Noonan. This last piece was rather bungled in Sligo. The Dalkey presentation seemed to make adequate amends.
