The Road - Gerald Barry
Concerto for the Left Hand - Ravel
The Conquest of Ireland - Gerald Barry
Daphnis and Chloe Suite No 2 - Ravel
On the surface, there's a certain innocence about Gerald Barry's music. But it's a wild innocence. He doesn't pose those "What if?" questions which, even in adventurously complex music, often manage to keep the conventions and rhetorical sensitivities of instrumental and vocal performance practice in mind. He simply asks "Why not?" and ploughs ahead, forcing fingers, lips and vocal cords to deal with the consequences however they may.
The compositional strength is in the process. Barry can take, or generate, his material from the most unlikely of sources, sources which relate to the music itself like a code to the message it yields. And, of course, the process is mediated, if that's the word, by an imagination fired by effects paralleling in music the impossible feats of stage illusionists. There's always likely to be something unexpected up his sleeve.
The opening concert of the Lyric FM Gerald Barry Festival at the NCH on Wednesday offered the Irish premieres of two works, the orchestral piece, The Road, commissioned by Hessian Radio for the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1997, and The Conquest of Ireland, commissioned by the BBC in 1995.
The Road (the title taken from a childhood image of sun and high wind on a remote road) opens with an impression of internal turmoil, as if something is struggling to find its shape and expression. There are momentary suggestions that the piece will turn American, into Ivesian vernacular or the open-air style of Copland. But Barry yields up some of his magically instantaneous transformations. The orchestra delivers rapid cluster-bombs, then, without a flicker, the atmosphere becomes overcast and veiled with a blurry spookiness. Another exhilaratingly dizzy ride through the swirl and joust of Barry's orchestral landscape is truly underway.
The Conquest of Ireland, a setting of texts from the Expugnatio Hibernica by the 12th-century Giraldus Cambrensis, also known as Girald de Barri. Barry treats the strangely bald descriptive writing of his near namesake with meaning-wrenching freedom. He subjects the opening "I" to a protracted merry dance, and elsewhere in these oddly impersonal descriptions of men and war, he both rips words apart and compresses them for delivery at tongue-twisting speed. It's actually both funny and strangely moving, and calls for a singer who can bellow, bray and whistle, and won't falter at the prospect of stressful falsetto. The English bass Stephen Richardson rose superbly to all the unusual demands, his virtuosity dealing as surely with the remarkable theatricality as with the musical intricacy.
The NSO under Robert Houlihan sounded uncomfortably challenged in The Road (particularly the brass), but were in altogether finer form in The Conquest of Ireland. Pavel Nersessian was the soloist in Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, placing the music under a bright, analytical light through playing that was cleanly sculpted and fearlessly muscular.
Houlihan's approach in Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suite No 2 showed again that rewarding, cool inquisitiveness which, whenever he's been given the engagements in recent years, has encouraged from the NSO a well-adjusted and richly-detailed style that is not their wont. We should be allowed hear a lot more of him.
