Reviewed today are the Kronos String Quartet at the O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin and McGonnell, Callino String Quartet at the Coach House, Dublin Castle
Kronos String Quartet
O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin
Michael Dervan
The Kronos Quartet has long established a reputation as a ground breaking ensemble specialising in new music. Yet some of the typical Kronos programmes of today, like the one they offered in the first of their two concerts at the O'Reilly Theatre in Dublin, is really a throwback to the past.
Before concert programmes became the meaty things we now expect them to be, many recitals were littered with lighter confections. In the old days, the heavy stuff usually came before the interval, and the tuneful, often virtuosic treats were saved for the second half.
Kronos often dot the lighter stuff throughout the evening, and that's what they did on Wednesday. If you had to find a ready analogy for this particular end of the Kronos repertoire, you wouldn't be far wrong if you started with the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt.
The idea is to find something that will seem exotic and novel in the context of a concert hall, and groom and shape it so that it both fits the medium it has been translated into, and also, from time to time, makes one marvel how clever performers can make that medium so adapt so flexibly to such unlikely raw material.
The arrangements in the programme proper (treating work by the Indian film composer RD Burman, the Ethiopian saxophonist Gétatchéw Mèkurya, and jazzman Charlie Mingus) offered on this occasion a lot less in immediacy of appeal and sonic wizardry than the two encores, which gave the Kronos treatment to Flugufrelsarinn by the Icelandic rock group Sigur Rós, and Mini Skirt by Juan García Esquivel.
The sonic wizardry, a loose equivalent of Liszt's extra hand and finger effects, is of course partly the outcome of electronic manipulation.
Kronos is an amplified, processed string quartet, with frequent recourse in arrangements to a battery of effects quite outside the scope of four purely acoustic string instruments.
Wednesday's programme also included a number of pieces that didn't really stray too far from the Kronos arrangement mode, Aleksandra Vrebalov's gypsy-flavoured Pannonia Boundless, Franghis Ali-Zadeh's droplet-drenched Oasis, and Felipe Pérez Santiago's Camposanto, which left an altogether less firm impression.
John Zorn's Cat O' Nine Tails, subtitled Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade, takes the quartet through amusingly cartoonish stretchings and dilations, mimicking in sound the physical free-wheeling of the world of animated films, and employing a vocabulary that ranges as freely through avant-garde gestures as through the music of the past.
The concert ended with Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, a work for either three separate string quartets, or one live quartet with the other two parts pre-recorded. It's a wonderful idea, and brought some of the most rhythmically vital playing of the evening, even though the balance achieved between recorded and live sound seemed less than ideally clear.
Maybe it really needs to be done with Kronos onstage surrounded by a pair of clones.
McGonnell, Callino String Quartet
Coach House, Dublin Castle
Martin Adams
Weber - Clarinet Quintet. Tate - Duo for clarinet and cello.
Brahms - Clarinet Quintet
There was just one disappointment in Wednesday's concert by clarinettist Carol McGonnell and the Callino String Quartet, and it had nothing to do with their playing. Because of an unspecified technical hitch, it was not possible to present Kevin Volans's new piece for solo clarinet, Double Take.
Nevertheless, this was a fine concert in every respect. It was the last in a three-venue tour (also to Kilkenny and Newcastle Co Wicklow) with the same programme, by the previous and current winners of Music Network's Young Musicwide award.
One of the most striking things about the playing was its naturalness. The opening of the Weber Clarinet Quintet typified the players' sensitive imagination. The long string chords sounded at first like a slow introduction; then the clarinet came in; and its shorter note values seemed to be saying, "Let's get going - follow me!" The strings did; and that's what that piece is all about.
Phyllis Tate's Duo for Clarinet and Cello gave one a concentrated view of how the larger ensemble worked. In this neat, technically demanding specimen of mid-20th-century English modernism, Sarah McMahon's cello playing was not just technically secure - it made Tate's essentially lyrical writing sing. The same was true of McGonnell's clarinet playing. It seemed impossible to separate the personalities of the players and the instruments - two real characters, in an impeccable give-and-take dialogue.
In the Weber, Carol McGonnell produced a couple of uncharacteristic blips in tone and clarity. But not in the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, where all five musicians showed superb awareness of the elaborate scoring, and an ability to produce a long-range legato that musicians of far more experience would envy. It was a warm and warming performance of one of the great things in music.
