Refrain - Henryk Gorecki
Tribe - Deirdre Gribbin
Celestial Pied Piper - Deirdre Gribbin
Introducing the concert she programmed in the National Symphony Orchestra's Horizons series on Tuesday, composer Deirdre Gribbin described herself as "passionate about orchestration". You could sense from her words the quickening of the pulse she experiences over the corporealisation that's initiated when the sounds she imagines find their final instrumental colours.
The 1965 Refrain by Henryk Gorecki, which she chose to precede her own music, opens with clustery, sustained, slowly-shifting string chords, interspersed with truncated brass interjections. It brought to mind the image of a cloud formation, visited by fleeting foreign objects, a connection which may well have been prompted by Gribbin's own special interest in the behaviour of comets.
That fascination has resulted in an Oort cycle, of which Celestial Pied Piper, premiered last year, is the final work. The music, for solo clarinet (John Finucane) and ensemble, is jagged and bold, but the gravitational forces the composer wants to register simply didn't function for me.
The violence and conflict of Tribe, also for ensemble rather than full orchestra, reflect Gribbin's only musical response to the troubled Belfast of her childhood in the 1970s. There's a symbolic musical presence for both sides in the conflict, and the work ends in a mood of calm and uplift. But, as with Celestial Pied Piper, the music, with all its vivid colouring, doesn't quite convince.
The performances under Gerhard Markson, especially of the opening Gorecki, showed a control and musical purpose that the NSO doesn't often display in the more demanding music of the last halfcentury or so.
