The Ros Tapestry, a community project that was developed by more than 150 volunteers, is a celebration of the history of New Ross, a latter-day Bayeux for the southeast of Ireland.
The Ros Tapestry Suite, commissioned by the New Ross Piano Festival, is not just a musical celebration of the tapestry and the events remembered in its 15 panels, but is also a cross-section of composition in Ireland in the second decade of the 21st century.
The festival is commissioning five composers a year over a three-year period, with each being asked to respond to a different panel from the tapestry. The first works, last year, were by Sebastian Adams, Elaine Agnew, Gerald Barry, John Kinsella and Gerry Murphy. This year’s composers are Linda Buckley, Deirdre Gribbin, Andrew Hamilton, Sam Perkin and Eric Sweeney.
The composers' responses are, as you might expect, very varied. They range from the impressionistic (Eric Sweeney's Evening: The Lighthouse at Hook Head) to the programmatic, either pared-down (Linda Buckley's William Marshal, the Flower of Chivalry) or overtly pictorial (Deirdre Gribbin's Ex Voto Tintern Abbey: William Marshal's Stormy Crossing to Ireland).
The others are more abstract, taking the different worlds and emotions represented as a starting point for musical material that's cut up and reassembled like mismatched brickwork (Andrew Hamilton's Hunt in the Forest of Ros) or, finding an angle on the themes of the tapestry that links to the self-repeating layers of a Matryoshka doll (Sam Perkin's The Marriage of William Marshal and Isabel de Clare, subtitled Nesting Doll).
The performances, by Daria van den Bercken (Gribbin), Finghin Collins (Perkin), Alexei Grynyuk (Hamilton), Olga Scheps (Sweeney), Cédric Tiberghien (Buckley), were all top-notch. The piece I most want to hear again is Perkin’s; the composer’s playful, teasing writing got fully under the skin.
Interestingly, when next year’s pieces are written, the whole suite, should anyone care to perform it as an entity, will constitute a full concert programme in its own right.
This year’s festival was the 10th, a landmark that occasioned a visit by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, not to the regular venue of St Mary’s Church, which is too small to accommodate an orchestra, but to the parish church of St Mary and St Michael, where a programme of three piano concertos was on offer.
So different were the works and the players that the sound of the instrument changed over the course of the evening, so much so that you could almost imagine it having been a concert with three different pianos.
I was seated quite close to the front, an effect that is rather like being close to the screen in a cinema. Everything gets bigger and more immediate, but there’s a loss of perspective and the immediate detail triumphs over the bigger picture.
Collins, directing from a lidless piano, was a romantically warm guide to Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. Tiberghien drove with dynamic swagger through Mendelssohn’s First Concerto, tackling some of the octave work with Lisztian exuberance. Grynyuk was steelier in tone in the late romantic world of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, and also at times wonderfully pliable. But the centre never held in the performance of a work that needs a stronger musical personality than Grynyuk seemed able to summon on this occasion.
The festival's format features concerts that juxtapose performances by its major visitors. Tiberghien shone in a harmonically well-judged performance of Berg's early Sonata, Collins got to the heart of Schumann's rather neglected Fantasiestücke, Op 111, and Grynyuk produced a tumultuous account of Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka, though not always with Stravinsky's exact notes.
Two players at an earlier stage in their careers get a whole lunchtime recital to themselves. Moscow-born Olga Scheps made a good general impression, but strayed without announcement from her advertised programme to the point of dropping one piece entirely.
The Dutch-Russian player Daria van den Bercken has fallen in love in a way that’s unusual for a 21st-century pianist. She has developed a grá for the keyboard music of Handel. In New Ross, this was best conveyed in her delicately shaped encore, the Adagio from the Suite No 2 in F, the work by Handel that turned her head in the first place.
Irish premiere of Dennehy opera
Back in Dublin, the theatre festival on Sunday featured the Irish premiere of Donnacha Dennehy's opera The Last Hotel, with a libretto by Enda Walsh in a production that the writer also directed. The world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival has already been covered in these pages by Peter Crawley.
Opera is a very special case of what you might call hyperreality, with crisis-afflicted, often lovestruck people singing about the conflicts, tribulations and ecstasies they’re experiencing.
The actual words of The Last Hotel are sometimes both as mundanely banal and as loaded as those conversations you might have heard from time to time back in the days when crossed lines were an infuriatingly regular feature of Ireland's landline network.
The high-impact nervous energy of Dennehy’s score is often topped by almost impossibly creamy-sounding soprano lines from Claudia Boyle and Katherine Manley. Dennehy, of course, is a man enamoured of computers and electronics, and the voices in the opera are amplified so that they are not only able to compete with, but can also, whenever the composer desires, assert themselves over, the often sonically assaulting sound of the Crash Ensemble.
I’ve often complained about amplification at Crash gigs. And, yes, I did once again wonder at the insistence on volume that would trounce a full orchestra. But the balance between voices and instruments/electronics was so well executed that you could forget the artifice involved. And in this work the artifice allowed a range of unusually expressive vocal effects. As Stravinsky said, good orchestration is when you don’t notice it.
- The Last Hotel is at the Dublin Theatre Festival until Saturday, and has been filmed for future broadcast on Sky Arts
