Borris House, Borris, Co Carlow
The stage set-up for the first of Sunday’s Borris House concerts at the new Barrow River Arts Festival said it all. There was a double bassist, Barry Guy, with his instrument wired to an active loudspeaker through a foot-pedal. There was a baroque violinist (Maya Homburger) and a poet (Kerry Hardie). The stage also held a Steinway concert grand, there was a harpsichord on the floor, and the walls were hung with art.
This new event may be a boutique festival, but its directors (Homburger and Guy) are pursuing an all-encompassing vision, which earlier embraced Irish traditional music as well as a juggler working with a jazz percussionist.
The first of Sunday’s three concerts was billed as a programme of baroque and modern works for violin and double bass, as well as improvisations, that would “include readings by Kerry Hardie”.
In the event, it turned out rather more on the lines of a sequence of readings from Hardie’s Selected Poems, framed and separated by (and sometimes overlapping with) a sequence of music, none of which was identified in the published programme or by the performers.
It’s not exactly an easy formula to bring off. But on Sunday it worked. The music, whatever its period, and whether composed or improvised, seemed to come from a single fount, just as the poems so demonstrably did.
Hardie read in the way many poets do, the pitch of her voice slightly raised, the manner defaulting to the apparently interrogative. Her poems offered calm reflections on loss and imminent loss, both faced with a kind of wry resignation and fortitude.
Dutch baritone Maarten Koningsberger and Kilkenny-based harpsichordist Malcolm Proud focused on 17th-century song from England, France and the Netherlands, with half the programme given over to Henry Purcell. No texts or translations were provided, but Koningberger gave spoken introductions to the foreign-language songs, and sang the English ones with such clarity that not a word went unheard.
He’s a singer with a rich and flexible voice, and he knows how to lean this way and that on a text so that it suggests exactly what he wants. That may sound like a perfect recipe for success, but that’s not quite what he delivered. In the end, he seemed to be trying to make the songs into something rather grander than they are, and his delivery somehow contrived to sound altogether too modern for the songs themselves, as well as for the actual sound of Proud’s harpsichord.
The ever-unpredictable greatness of Purcell’s spirit was best represented in Proud’s performance of a Suite in G minor for solo harpsichord.
It would have been easy enough in the music and poetry concert to divine that there’s not much that can be done on a double bass that Barry Guy can’t do. For the closing concert, he was joined by the rapid-fingered, strong-wristed Spanish jazz pianist and improviser, Agustí Fernández, for a sequence of numbers that ranged from riotous and manic to the sheerly soulful.
