NCH, Dublin

Prokofiev – Symphony No 2.

Strauss – Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

THE WORK of the composer Frederick May (1911-85) is little known, even in his native Ireland. He stopped composing in 1955 and just two of his works were issued on LP during his lifetime.

The centenary has brought a flurry of activity celebrating a man dubbed by German musicologist Axel Klein as “one of Ireland’s grandfathers of contemporary music”.

RTÉ Lyric FM have just issued a CD of his orchestral music. The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet are touring his String Quartet, and on Saturday, RTÉ, the Contemporary Music Centre and the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama presented an afternoon of reminiscences, papers and performances titled after May’s last orchestral work, Sunlight and Shadow.

There was some useful cobweb clearing by DIT lecturer Mark Fitzgerald.

May is famous for having planned to study with the great Alban Berg in Vienna. Fitzgerald has marshalled facts and dates that thoroughly undermine that claim, although the news of Berg’s death in 1935 did impact on the composition of May’s best work, his String Quartet.

Writer Colm Tóibín, who struck up a friendship with May in the Stag’s Head pub in the 1970s, described that quartet as “one of the greatest contributions to Irish beauty that has ever been made”. And he also told how the composer honoured his promise to be the first to dance on the grave of Ernest Blythe, with whom May had crossed swords when working as musical director of the Abbey Theatre.

Drawing comparisons with Flann O’Brien, Tóibín put the Berg story down to a communal need for “a glamorous myth of loss”.

Overall, though, the afternoon was remarkable for its lack of contextualisation. Among Irish composers, only John F Larchet, May’s predecessor at the Abbey, rated a mention.

It was as if the activities of Charles Villiers Stanford, Hamilton Harty, Norman Hay, Ina Boyle, Aloys Fleischmann, Brian Boydell and others had been sucked into a historical vacuum.

May may well have expected such a fate for himself.

“I just hope that when I and all my damn personal failures are gone, there’ll still be something left of use to people afterwards,” he said in an interview in these pages in 1974.

In that particular context, Saturday’s commemoration was the best of news