Events reviewed by Irish Times writers include the Sligo New Music Festival and La Boheme
Sligo New Music Festival, Model Arts & Niland Gallery
On the face of it there might not seem to be much to connect the composers Luigi Nono (1924-91) and Morton Feldman (1926-87).
The Venetian Nono, a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party, was associated with the post-war Darmstadt avant-garde (he taught on the famous summer course) and, in a spirit of heady idealism, liked to take his music to workers on the factory floor.
New Yorker Feldman, who was influenced more by painter friends than by other composers, wanted, as he put it, "not to 'compose', but to project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric".
It was one of the paradoxes of the 1950s that compositional approaches at opposite extremes of the spectrum - the total serialism in vogue in Europe and the chance-governed compositions of John Cage in the US - could result in sound worlds which many listeners found difficult to tell apart. And both Feldman and Nono, who chose to steer away from orthodoxy and dogma, ended up writing music in which the surface and its minutest tilts, curves and textural changes came to dominate.
For some people, of course, it's a bit like experiencing the melt of chocolate, the texture of an apple, or the effervescence of champagne without the taste. But Nono and Feldman knew what they were about, and the rules of sensory deprivation kick in for any listener willing to travel with them.
The loss on one level is compensated for by the increased intensity of perception on another. To return to the food analogy, you may miss out on the taste, but you can have a melt, a texture, a bubbling on the tongue which take over your senses like none you've never experienced before.
The programmes which Ian Wilson devised for this year's Sligo New Music Festival ranged far and wide in Feldman's output but concentrated on three late works by Nono. Strangely, it was not in the rich-textured string sonorities of the latter's Hay que caminar soñando for two violins (Ioana Petcu Colan and Sarah Sexton), or the sometimes saturated world of La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura for violin and eight-track tape with live electronics (Petcu Colan with Jürgen Simpson) that Nono on this occasion sounded at his best.
Instead it was in . . . sofferte onde serene . . ., which places a solo piano (Sarah Nicholls) in a pre-recorded sea of piano fragments - the raw material provided by the composer's friend, Maurizio Pollini. In the constricted space of the Model Arts & Niland Gallery's black box, Jürgen Simpson's sound-projection created just the right experience of total sonic immersion.
The Callino String Quartet were involved in Feldman early (Structures of 1951) and late (Piano and String Quartet of 1985). The technical demands of these two works are very different, the first lasting only a few minutes, the second hovering quietly, turning its material over again and again, with minute modifications, for nearly an hour and a half.
It was in the shorter work that the Callino's gestural aim found its target. And, similarly, Sarah Nicholls sounded more at one with the two early solo piano pieces she played, Piano Piece (to Philip Guston) and Extensions 3, than in the long chamber work. A Critical Voices panel discussion on Nono and Feldman lacked focus and generated rather more heat than light.
The Callinos shone in the clearly post-Webernian, haunting micro-world of Hungarian composer György Kurtág - they played his Officium breve and Aus der Ferne III. And Nancy Ruffer played two works by that high priest of complexity, Brian Ferneyhough, glorying in the piercing immediacy of Superscriptio for piccolo and the sensuality of Mnemosyne for bass flute and tape.
Irish music featured in a free, "Come and Go" concert of electro-acoustic work, where the most intriguing item was Judith Ring's Mouthpiece, creating walls and waves of choral tone from the impeccably choral voice of Natasha Lohan.
Jürgen Simpson's new The Second Lesson of the Anatomists, a setting of texts by Sinead Morrissey for soprano, flute, string quartet and piano, had no shortage of ideas, but worked them rather too hard and remained oddly impenetrable.
Sligo-based composer Siobhán Cleary's pared-to-bare-essentials style was well represented in the harsh chorale of Suantraí, a "broken-hearted lullaby" for solo piano, and Carrowkeel, a kind of latter-day, sectionalised baroque fantasia with Arvo Pärtish outer sections framing a sometimes highly-energised toccata-like core. Michael Dervan
Alexeev, RTÉ NSO/Ollila, NCH, Dublin Esa-Pekka Salonen - LA Variations. Grieg - Piano Concerto. Sibelius - Symphony No 2
For its all-Scandinavian programme here - including works by the Norwegian Grieg and the Finn Sibelius - the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra opened with the 1997 LA Variations by Finland's Esa-Pekka Salonen, less known as a composer than as the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
His 20-minute piece for large orchestra presents 15-odd variations based on two chords which between them account for all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. But Salonen combines this serial foundation with much non-serial thinking and produces music, as he says himself, that is "very clear in its form and direct in its expression".
And so it sounded, with Salonen's enthusiastic exploitation of the full gamut of orchestral sound generating all the vigour, violence, intimacy, humour and stylistic contrast of the city after which the piece was named. (Sadly, the dreadful note in the printed programme was almost entirely void of facts and background and as such offered little by way of guidance to the interested newcomer to the work.)
Pianist Dmitri Alexeev, a regular visitor here, gave a masterclass in performance under pressure as the soloist in Grieg's Piano Concerto. A number of conspicuous slips spread throughout the three movements signalled that he - or rather, his right hand - was having an off-night. Despite this, however, he played with a passionate, expressive appetite that produced a performance full of life and meaning and beauty. With such playing, wrong notes count for little, this reflected in the instant and exuberant response of the audience.
Alexeev enjoyed an ideal partnership with Finnish conductor Tuomas Ollila, who, apart from a quivering unsteadiness in the slow movement's prominent horn solos, delivered the orchestra as a strong but pliant complement to the piano.
To close, Ollila brought a rare, crisp energy to Sibelius's well-known Second Symphony. He drew the cleanest of responses from the strings and had the brass in bright, ringing form in an exhilarating account of the first movement. With a fine economy of gesture he held his players to a tight unanimity in the abrupt tempo changes of the second movement and in the subtle contrasts of shading in the quicksilver third. And the Finale - with its romantic "big tune" - sounded less like Tchaikovsky than usual and instead grew into a monumental apex for all the energy that had been in steady release since the work's opening bars. Michael Dungan
La Bohème, The Helix, Dublin
The inaugural production by Yorkshire-based Opus 1 Music Ltd is an avowed exercise in opera as good, old-fashioned entertainment. With an orchestra and chorus scaled down to the bare minimum (perhaps, at times, even below that), the no-frills travelling company emphasises the lighter side of Puccini's emotional kaleidoscope. Levity, not pathos, gets the upper hand.
Frolicsome at every opportunity, the staging relies on well-timed movement and shrewd use of space. On the curtainless, un-surtitled, but clearly visible platform of The Helix's Mahony Hall, director/designer Jonathan Clift's economical set doubled effectively (with a few adjustments) for indoor and outdoor scenes, although it could be too brightly illuminated when the action demanded gloom.
Fraser Goulding geared his musical direction less to precise coordination than to sensitive pacing of events. If the slenderness of the chorus was noticeable, that of the string section was less so, and some suave solo playing more than adequately substituted for a full supply of woodwind.
Though the drama ultimately hit its tragic mark, ardour was lacking in the preparatory stages between the leading lovers. Singing in overdrive, Paul Featherstone was a brash Rodolfo, while Paula Sides, though much trimmer in tone, made a somewhat reserved Mimi. In contrast, Rodolfo's cronies were fittingly cast, with Michael Parle as a pensive Colline and Rhys Jenkins as an amiably Pickwickian Schaunard.
Strongest and best characterised of all, however, were Andrew Heggie as Marcello and Judith Gardner Jones as Musetta. With focused voices and vivid stage presences, this feisty, big-hearted pair were a supporting act that couldn't help stealing the show. Andrew Johnstone
Today at INEC Killarney
