At the Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday, Fergus Johnston introduced a selection of his chamber music with the assistance of Jane Chapman (piano/harpsichord), Eleanor Dawson (flute/baroque flute), Izumi Kumura (piano), Emily Hughes (recorder) and Sacha Kraleva (violin).
Johnston favours titles which give the listener a clue to the composer's preoccupations, but one would have been hard put to guess that The Oul' Winda Rag was an anagram of The Guardian Owl, the symbol of the company which sponsors the Guardian Dublin Piano Competition. This piece was played with considerable bravura by Izumi Kumura in her one appearance.
The other work for solo piano, Bog Boogie, was played on the harpsichord by Jane Chapman in a new, vertically compressed version. Both works show the composer testing ideas, rather like a scientist bending a wire to find out how and when it breaks.
Opus Lepidopterae and Psyche were both related to butterflies. The former piece, for flute and piano, was lighthearted, while Psyche, for solo recorder, was introspective. Both were tuneful, if not quite as obviously so as the lullaby which concluded Journeys. This was written with the co-operation of Soilse, an organisation for people trying to recover from drug addiction. Sounds of children playing, the recital of texts about addiction and other aural phenomena were fed into a computer and metamorphosed into something that could hardly be categorised either as music or social commentary.
Obstinate, for solo violin, was a purely musical exploration, played by Sacha Kraleva, but Morrighan, for baroque flute and harpsichord, used a computer from time to time, an aid which did not seem to me to add anything important to this evocation of the Irish war goddess.
