The final weekend of Kilkenny Arts Week was dominated by a contemporary music ensemble from Sweden, Ensemble Son. This group, with a line-up of guitar (Magnus Andersson), percussion (Jonny Axelsson), trombone (Ivo Nilsson), saxophone (Jorgen Petersson), flute (Mik ael Pettersson) and mandolin (Sven Aberg), gave two concerts, the first (Friday evening at St Canice's Cathedral) introducing newly-commissioned works by Roger Doyle and Barry Guy, the second (yesterday at noon in the James O'Donoghue & Co Gallery) devoted entirely to Swedish music.
Roger Doyle's quartet, Shindstu (listed in the programme book under its working title, Deep Grammar), is for the core Son membership (saxophone, trombone, percussion and guitar). It exploits their experience in improvisation and uses the trombone to trigger pre-composed electroacoustic sounds via a pitch-to-MIDI converter.
Doyle's music often marries super-naivety and sophistication. In this piece, there was, on the one hand, the often bare-sounding trombone line (bogged down, perhaps, by the composer's concern with its MIDI responsibilities) and a doodling, quiet tune on guitar, and, on the other, the altogether more resourceful if hardly original-sounding world of the electronics. There was a flatness to the music, as if the composer's concern over the processes he was engaged in had become more important than the outcome of those processes, which, in the end, is all the audience experiences.
Barry Guy's Holyrood, for the full ensemble (joined by Guy himself on double bass) with an electronic soundtrack, continues this composer's preoccupation with the visual in music. It takes its inspiration from Albert Irvin's screenprint Holyrood II (oddly, not among the works chosen for reproduction in the festival programme book) and pursues the course of integrating graphics as well as conventional notation into the score. With Guy onstage as a sort of master-router, the piece juxtaposed coolness and meta-frenzy in a manner not unlike - but not as compelling as - Guy's own uniquely hot 'n' cool improvisation on the double bass.
Ensemble Son also introduced Kilkenny audiences to two works by Swansea-born, Amsterdam-resident Richard Barrett, colloid-E for 10-string guitar and ensemble, and EARTH for trombone and percussion. The former's trapped lyricism made an slighter impression than the harsh and often violent struggle of the latter.
Earth is one of a series of Fictions, with the composer exploring this particular combination as a means of presenting "possible relationships between instruments incommensurate in timbre, technique and/or register, by forcing them together into ensemble rhythms". This description really suggests little of the drama Barrett invests in the encounter, drawing the listener in with ineluctable magnetism.
Yesterday's Swedish programme included the jokey Fanar by Eric Forare, the earnest Intra by Jan W. Morthenson, the intricately-intertwined Toile tournee by Chrichan Larson, melding the timbres of saxophone and trombone, the game-like strategies for working out combinations of guitar, vibraphone and trombone in Ivo Nilsson's Tre equali, and two highly-contrasted pieces by Sten Melin, Hyssj (Hush) for other-worldly quiet piccolo and harmonicsobsessed guitar, and a noholds-barred, world music send-up, Seven Heaven.
Magnus Andersson's lunchtime guitar recital on Saturday (St Canice's Cathedral) presented the familiar (Giuliani, Tarrega, Albeniz, Villa-Lobos) and the unfamiliar (Bent Sorensen and Uros Rojko) in a carefully-planned sequence illustrating the different schools of guitar music and performance. The performances were uneven, rusty, even tentative in the standard fare, altogether more persuasive in the more recent work. Sorensen's Angelus Waltz and Shadow Siciliano are both short, disembodied studies, like faded reproductions where the whole has to be imagined on the basis of a few, barely-discernible fragments. Rojko's Passing Away takes a minimum of material and spins it out with focus and rigor as well as wit (he studied with Ligeti) so that it becomes a clear-sighted essay in form.
Saturday evening's recital at St Canice's was given by cellist Raphael Wallfisch, accompanied by Ronan O'Hora. Wallfisch's playing throughout the evening was notable for the easy fullness of his gorgeous, flowing tone. If this sort of tonal indulgence were all that were required in sonatas by Beethoven (Op. 102 No. 1 in D) and Brahms (Op. 99 in F), the Much Ado About Nothing Suite by Korngold, the Stucke im Volkston by Schumann or the Op. 72 Sonata for Solo Cello by Vainberg, then this recital would be about as good as you would get. The derisorily subservient balances of the piano, however, often made nonsense of the musical material. The Brahms sonata, curiously (by dint, I suspect, of the difficulty of the piano part), fared best in this regard, even better than the mostly melodically-driven Korngold suite.
Only the finely-contrasted moods of the Vainberg sonata, rich in resonances of Shostakovich, came across as a truly convincing musical statement.
