The Model, Sligo
You’ve got to hand it to the people behind The Model in Sligo. They stuck to their guns and over the years patiently transformed what was an arts centre in a run-down old school, with its intriguing mixture of exciting experimentalism and physical dilapidation, into a major piece of civic infrastructure.
The Model, primarily an art gallery, is also home to two annual music festivals, the Sligo New Music Festival in spring and the Sligo Festival of Baroque Music in the autumn. It’s quite an achievement for Sligo. There are at the moment only a handful of festivals in this country which specialise in these musical areas, and Sligo has two of them. And the town is also one of those regional centres with its own concert season, the annual Con Brio Sligo Music Series, curated by composer Ian Wilson.
The recent Baroque Festival was my first experience of the Model’s new performing space, which, ominously, is signposted within the building as both Cinema and Theatre. And, I kid you not, it’s more cinema than anything else. It’s a black box space dominated by a large cinema screen, its walls festooned with drapes and surround-sound speakers, with one of the speakers even impeding the folding movement of a panel for adjusting the acoustic.
What on earth were they thinking about? Sligo already has a multi-screen cinema, which even offers HD screenings of live opera from the Met in New York. And it also has a well-established theatre, the Hawk’s Well.
Like other black box performing spaces around the country, the sound in The Model is dry and small, with little sense of amplitude and, for the light tone of baroque instruments, no sense of reverberation to speak of. A missed opportunity, if ever there was one.
The music and music-making of the Baroque Festival programme were enlivening. The major presence – giving three concerts – was harpsichordist Malcolm Proud, who is taking Bach’s six keyboard Partitas on tour, in partner- ship with musicologist David Ledbetter, who is introducing the performances.
Ledbetter’s introductions were informal rather than analytical. His focus was on presenting issues about the works as the composer might have thought about them, and also as they present themselves to the performer.
Bach’s six Partitas for keyboard occupy a place that’s out of all keeping with their profile in concert programmes. They were the pieces which the 46-year-old composer chose to present as his official published Opus 1 in 1731. And Ledbetter’s clarifications of compositional strategy – of the kind of showing-off that Bach was engaged in – and of the particular challenges and rewards for performers (including a call on which of the six is the most pleasurable to play) were illuminating.
Even more illuminating, of course, were Proud’s performances, solid in rhythmic projection but with a peculiarly energising kind of high-tension flexibility. It’s the kind of playing which suggests both intellectual rigour and spiritual exuberance, a combination that works a treat in the music of Bach.
The Partitas are effectively suites of stylised dances, and the festival also offered some rather more danceable dances from the French repertoire, played by the British ensemble Florilegium. And some of them were actually danced, in period costume, by early dance specialist Mary Collins, who often looked in expression and gesture as if she might have come to life from a scene in a painting of the period. The musical highlights of Florilegium’s programme were actually the breathtaking virtuoso solo viola playing of Reiko Ichise in a suite by Marin Marais, and Terence Charlston’s presentation of four solo harpsichord pieces by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
The weekend also featured the Italian/Irish Duo Arparla (David Monte, violin, Maria Christina Cleary, harp), exploring the quite fantastical world of Marco Uccellini (1610-1680), whose Op. 5 sonatas have a thoroughly engaging kind of Tristram Shandy-esque unpredictability. Cleary also undertook a late-night exploration of the little-known Dublin sojourn of the composer and harpist, Fanny Krumpholtz Pittar (1785-1815). The remaining concert, by Pamela Thorby (recorders), Peter Whelan (bassoon) and Elizabeth Kenny (baroque guitar and theorbo), put all three players impressively through their paces, and climaxed appropriately in Vivaldi’s wildly virtuosic Sonata for recorder and bassoon.
