NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin
Two members of New York’s Argento Ensemble acquired new instruments this year. Canadian flautist Erin Lesser and Irish clarinettist Carol McGonnell added the contrabass versions of their instruments to their musical armouries. And, under the banner Contra Culture, they are now exploring what has to be one of the more unusual niches of the contemporary repertoire.
Their programme in the New Sound Worlds series at the NCH included a piece from 1985 that was actually written for the two heavyweight instruments, both of which have to be played on spikes to support their weight.
Italian composer Luigi Nono’s A Pierre (Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum) was dedicated to Pierre Boulez, and calls for live electronics which are used to present a microfine sound world of ever-fluctuating, delicate air sounds, in which a firm note from the enormous flute can sound like a distant foghorn.
Austrian composer Beat Furrer’s Fama is a 2005 “audio theatre piece for large ensemble, eight voices, actress, and sound structure”.
Its starting points are Ovid’s House of Fame and Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, Fräulein Else. Its sixth scene is for actress and contrabass flute, and presents a young girl’s contemplation of an undesired sexual encounter that will have tragic consequences, to a background of vocalisations and flute sounds which ceaselessly flutter, quiver and click with nervous apprehension.
Offaly composer Ann Cleare describes her new Eyam, for bass clarinet and electronics, as a work that “navigates the territory of a mammoth, infected sonic object in turmoil”. Eyam is a Derbyshire village that famously chose to quarantine itself after a break-out of plague in 1665.
Cleare’s piece is of the kind that seems to take you inside a range of sounds that you can normally only perceive from outside. It’s as if she has successfully transplanted fantastical visual morphing techniques from sci-fi movies into the realm of sound, to present the almost sub-sonic shuddering of a contrabass clarinet from the inside, and then have it collapse on itself and re-emerge.
Two movements from New Yorker Harold Meltzer’s Rumors (1999) and Brazilian Alexandre Lunsqui’s Topografia (2001) explored percussive possibilities on piccolo, alto flute and bass flute.
Frenchman Allain Gaussain’s Satori (1998), for solo clarinet, explored a development of melodic line that both investigated microtonal gaps and donned the musical equivalent of 10-league boots in a way that blended struggle and sprezzatura. And the oldest piece in this adventurous programme, Giacinto Scelsi’s Suite for Flute and Clarinet of 1953, was intriguing for its unusual ways of merging and separating the sounds of the two instruments. The New Sound Worlds Series concludes next Tuesday
