Irish Times writers sample the musical delights of the Galway Arts Festival and a recita by the Australian organist, Anne Page, at St Michael's church in Dún Laoghaire.
Music From The Edge
Galway Arts Centre
Galway Arts Festival prides itself on being "Ireland's leading multidisciplinary arts festival". Yet it's not a celebration of the arts that has ever taken much account of what's hot or interesting in the world of classical music. It's as if the achievements of classical composers and performers are to be regarded as those of some frowned-upon relatives, whose existence must of course be acknowledged even though they're never really going to be made welcome at the house.
Into the breach left by the festival - a single lunchtime concert this year - have once again stepped Jane O'Leary's Concorde ensemble and Galway Arts Centre, offering seven half-hour performances of contemporary music as part of a Music From The Edge series.
O'Leary is a staunch advocate of the underdog, not just in pursuing the promotion of classical music at festival time but also in exactly what it is she chooses to promote.
Last weekend represented 21 works by 17 composers in a total of 27 performances. But only two front-rank figures featured (Luciano Berio and Steve Reich), while a lot of attention was paid to Irish composers, with one of the programmes devoted to specially written short works by younger and emerging composers.
During the three concerts I heard on Sunday the major figure was Reich, whose 1985 New York Counterpoint, for solo clarinet and pre-recorded clarinet ensemble, was performed by Concorde's Paul Roe, using a newly recorded mix of himself playing the ensemble parts.
Whether in the work's throb of pulsating chords or the chases of bouncing and floating motifs, Roe gave the work a slightly unsettling edge. It was as if there were something about the music's underlying security of momentum he had set out to undermine, to give this minimalist classic an unexpected twist.
Roe also featured with Galway's ensemble in residence, the ConTempo Quartet, in the 1977 Concertino for bass clarinet and string quartet by the Dutch composer Tristan Keuris. Keuris, who died at the age of 50 in 1996, constructed the Concertino out of polarised gestures, a central, recitative-like section exploiting the alluring colours of the bass clarinet, framed by more energetic, rhythmically choppy, string-dominated sections, with a quiet detour for an ending.
The Concertino had a solid, even retro feel, in a setting where so much was experimental, as did Jane O'Leary's own Joyful Jottings for clarinet and cello (Martin Johnson), written for an amateur-musician friend.
The other strongly characterised piece was the short Duo for bass clarinet and accordion (Dermot Dunne) by Gráinne Mulvey. Mulvey, now in her late 30s, is a composer who feels closely attached to the avant-garde ferment of the 1950s and 1960s. The trills and swirls of her duo clearly gave the performers something to get their teeth into, in an event where quite an amount of the music seemed to do the opposite, treating process as content rather than material or gesture.
The problem with O'Leary's programming style is that in spite of - or because of - its worthiness, the hit rate can be dangerously low. So it was on this occasion.
Among the other works, it was the flickering Irish flavour of Derek Kelly's brief Cadé Sin? for solo cello that offered the strongest suggestion of mutating into something really interesting.
Michael Dervan
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Anne Page
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
The annual summer series of organ recitals at St Michael's church in Dún Laoghaire continued with a performance by the Cambridge-based Australian organist Anne Page.
Her all-Bach programme was dominated by no less than seven treatments of the chorale Allein Gott In Der Höh'sei Ehr (Glory Be To God On High).
The first was a relatively straightforward harmonisation with flourishes (BWV 715) in a broad, majestic registration, followed by quiet but tangy colours for the melody over counterpoint of BWV 711. Fugal devices were the chief feature of BWV 716 and 717, the latter within a gentle gigue texture.
Allein Gott In Der Höh'sei Ehr appears in three settings (BWV 662-664) in Bach's "Leipzig" collection, chorales composed during the Weimar period that he later collected and revised at Leipzig. Page played all three, revealing the lightest, loosest of touches in the elaborate ornamentation of BWV 662 and choosing a vivid woodwind registration for the trio-sonata texture and bubbly counterpoint of BWV 664.
She interspersed her programme with three non-chorale pieces, opening the recital with the early three-movement Pièce D'Orgue, BWV 572.
A nervy-sounding start soon gave
way to the kind of precision, assurance and animation that would characterise the evening. She played another early piece - the Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 550 - about halfway through and closed with a show of steely vitality in the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C, BWV 564, giving the beautiful slow section in a manner that avoided sentimentality yet sounded tender nonetheless.
Michael Dungan
