RDS, Dublin
Lully
– Le triomphe de l’amour Suite.
Mozart– Violin Concerto No 4.
Andrew Hamilton– The Institute of Failure and Power. Schubert– Symphony No 5.
You know how it happens. Something you’ve heard lodges in your head, and insists on going round and round and round. Not the whole piece, mind you, just a disconnected fragment of it, lost and looping. And whether you like what’s being repeated or not doesn’t seem to have much bearing on the persistence of the process.
It’s a process that obviously fascinates Dublin composer Andrew Hamilton. What he does is turn the whole business on its head. The locked-groove fragment becomes the starting point, a rhythmic tic out of which he chooses to grow a piece. And he has both patience and persistence with his material. He can drive it well beyond any expectations you might choose to have of it.
The opening of The Institute of Failure and Power, his new work for the Irish Chamber Orchestra, could be a fleeting moment from a Tchaikovsky ballet, something so well tucked away that you wouldn't normally notice it.
The composer relates the piece to the Benjamenta Institute for training in Swiss writer Robert Walser's 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten. He likes "the idea that an orchestral piece doesn't have to address the massive issues of our world, that it can be about the seemingly trivial failures we all make and yet somehow carry on".
The Institute of Power and Failurecarries on in a way that's relentlessly repetitious, yet spiked with the unexpected. It's quirky, witty, mechanistic, often ear-candyish, and even calls upon the viola players to sing as well as play.
It’s a tour-de-force of tinyness, and a kind of perpetual-motion tongue-twister for the players. The audience at the RDS cheered it as if they were absolutely certain they’d heard something very special indeed.
The ICO's artistic director, violinist Anthony Marwood, abandoned his normal post in the first desk of the orchestra's violins, and conducted the work with acuity. He also directed a light and stylish account of a suite from Lully's ballet Le triomphe de l'amour, was a sparkling soloist in the teenage Mozart's Violin Concerto in D, K218, and directed the teenage Schubert's Fifth Symphony with pointed energy.
