Ian Wilson has brought García Márquez's drowning man to life, with the help of Gavin Friday's voice and four talented chamber musicians, the composer tells Arminta Wallace
A glance through Ian Wilson's back catalogue shows that he's not a man to eschew playful titles. In fact, his compositions revel in them, from Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? through from the Book of Longing to an angel serves a small breakfast. Even by Wilson's standards, though, the title of his latest piece is - to say the least - unusual. The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World, a 20-minute work for narrator and orchestra based on a short story by the Colombian maestro Gabriel García Márquez, will be premiered at the National Gallery of Ireland this Thursday, October 4th.
"I find the genre of narration plus music a troublesome one," the Belfast-born composer admits. "There are many examples of it - but very few successful ones." When he was commissioned by the IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses festival and funded by the Arts Council to write just such a piece for its autumn mini-festival, therefore, his first task was to find a text that would work. "I definitely wanted a short story rather than a long poem," he says. "I wanted something where the narrator could be conversational without being too free. García Márquez has been one of my favourite writers since I first read a book of his about 10 years ago, and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World was in one of the first collections of his that I bought. It stayed with me as being a very beautiful text about something which, on the surface, is quite morbid or macabre."
The story opens with a group of children finding the body of a drowned man on the beach, and its quirky, ambivalent tone is established in the second paragraph: "They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village. . ." It's subtitled "a tale for children", and like all the best children's stories it's located somewhere between a shudder and a smile as the rotting corpse is transfigured into a symbol of community and, ultimately, humanity. "García Márquez does it with such a light touch," Wilson says. "He always transcends his material in that way - it always becomes magical - and I love the way he does that."
The next challenge was to find a suitable narrator. And who better than artist, composer and vocalist extraordinaire Gavin Friday, whose throaty, cheeky reading of Prokofiev's children's classic Peter and the Wolf, coupled with the Friday-Seezer ensemble's eclectic arrangement of the score, introduced the work to a whole new generation? Wilson grins. "To be honest," he admits, "I actually hadn't heard of Gavin at all. I mean, I'd heard of The Virgin Prunes, but that was a long time ago. But when I listened to Peter and the Wolf, I realised he has a very characterful voice which would be perfect for this project. He's well up for it, and he has made a couple of great suggestions in terms of my approach to its structure and rhythm.
"It's an interesting project in terms of the personnel, this one," he adds. "Obviously Gavin is very well known. The rock and pop world has very big characters, whereas in the classical music world you tend to hear a lot less about people. It's a minority sport compared with the other one. But these four chamber musicians - Catherine Leonard, Finghin Collins, Carol McGonnell, Guy Johnston - are the best of their generation. It makes for something potentially quite exciting. And it's always good to work with musicians of that quality. You get the job done well, and you don't really have any worries about, 'Oh, jeepers - are they going to be able to play that'?"
Wilson began his musical journey as a songwriter in a rock band. More recently he has written two chamber operas, one on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He is, therefore, well aware of how complex - or how manipulative - the relationship between words and music can be. The Handsomest Drowned Man requires that a very special balance be maintained between music and text; yet it's clearly important to Wilson that the piece would unfold in a single curve. The idea of halting the narration for something approaching a "show tune" moment from a musical obviously horrifies him. "There's a little introduction: then it's music and text all the way to the end," he says. "The text is always surrounded by music.
"It's the same approach I've taken with some of my concerto pieces. I want everything moving together, rather than that Brahmsian notion of the opposition of soloist and orchestra. I like everything to move as an organism." He divided the story into about 30 sections, then built the music around those. Did he still admire García Márquez's achievement after taking it apart like that? More to the point, did he find out how it works? "I don't know if you can really pin down something that wonderful by dissecting it," he says. "You can see how he balances things. There's a balance between the levity and the sadness, and there's never any sense of horror. You can see the way that everything pulls together, from the beginning right to the end. I suppose what I could say, after putting it under the microscope, is there's certainly no holes in it."
Wilson is a well-established contemporary composer with more than 60 pieces under his belt. He's also a member of Aosdána. He's not the type of guy to make ex-cathedra pronouncements about what music should be - but if he has a musical credo of his own, it has to do with stretching, growing and reaching. "I admire anybody who can consistently push their own boundaries artistically," he says. "I think standing still is very, very bad. I would listen to a lot of John Coltrane's music, for example - a guy who, literally by his own force of will, developed his technique from something which was quite ordinary to something extraordinary. Not only that, he pushed himself farther and farther away from the path he started on and became this incredible pioneer. I admire that so much - he felt he had to keep swimming."
In terms of Wilson's own work, what does it mean to "keep swimming"? Is it about trying out new musical forms? "For me, the exploration of new ideas and genres and ways of expression is the most vital thing," he says. "Whether it fails or succeeds is almost secondary - it's the trying that's important. If I was lazy and stayed in the areas I'm comfortable with, well, I'd get bored with my music, whatever about anybody else. It has to have a freshness, and that's often achieved by just taking a step to the side and taking a whole new look at my own context and my own experience.
"And it's not just about musical genres. I did a piece this year where I included an improvising saxophonist with a bunch of classical musicians - of itself, nothing new. But for me it was a new experience, and for the saxophonist as well, and it created something that I thought was unique in my own work. Now I'd like to expand the whole idea, and we're talking about doing a piece in a couple of years with three improvising musicians. Just try and push it a bit further, to see what we can do. I'm also doing a piece with a German trio which will involve a number of found objects. Disparate things. So there's elements of theatre coming in there. It's about ideas, really - seeing how I can work with material and musicians. That's what's interesting for me at the moment."
Great music in great houses
The IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses festival has come up with a terrific twosome for its autumn mini-festival. It consists of two concerts in the National Gallery of Ireland, one on Thursday October 4th at 6.30 p.m., one on Sunday October 7th at 8 p.m. The theme is suitably autumnal - death, loss, and ways of overcoming or transcending them. The first concert unveils Ian Wilson's specially-commissioned new work for narrator and chamber ensemble, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, narrated by Gavin Friday with Catherine Leonard, violin; Carol McGonnell, clarinet; Guy Johnston, cello and Finghin Collins, piano. Also on the menu is Olivier Messaien's breathtaking Quartet for the End of Time, written in a concentration camp.
The second evening, meanwhile, features a performance of Schubert's magisterial Schwanengesang (Swan Song) by the Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and the pianist Imogen Cooper. And you can book the lot - a brand-new piece, a 20th-century treasure and a slice of the sublime - for €50.
