Quatrain, named perhaps after the work by Takemitsu which ended this lunchtime recital, is made up of Therese Fahy (piano), Michael d'Arcy (violin), John Finucane (clarinet) and Aisling Drury Byrne (cello). This was the last recital in this year's Mostly Modern series and was devoted to the chamber music of Takemitsu (1930-1996).
The programme note refers to the influences of Debussy, Messiaen and Webern, and Ben Dwyer, introducing the recital, suggested that here was an oriental composer who colonised French music in the same way that French composers had colonised the music of the East. If this is so, he did it by getting under a western skin so successfully that all trace of his Japanese origins vanished.
The knowledge that his mother played the Koto, and the haiku-like suggestiveness of many of his titles, leads one to read into his music traces of zen and a non-western attitude to life. But listening carefully, can one hear anything but a re-arrangement of the techniques invented in Europe in the last century?
Crysanthemums and Fog, for violin and piano, had a characteristically fragmented structure, juxtaposing short sections in an illusory continuity, and presenting a harmonic language that mixed sour and sweet. Between Tides, for violin, cello and piano, with its richer instrumentation, had a greater variety of sound, and Quatrain II, for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, built up the richest textures, but all three works shared the same approach. They could have been played without breaks and without discontinuity, leaving the listener half attracted, half repelled.