DIT Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern Festival
Digitazioni< LIJohnny Grandert Palais de Mari - Feldman Sonata No 7 (White Mass) - Scriabin Van Horn Boogie - Stephen Ingham
The DIT Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern Festival got off to an unusual start on Thursday lunchtime. Bank of Ireland, which has eschewed the use of a full concert grand at its Dublin arts centre, has now downgraded its instrument to one of domestic proportion, completely unsuited to the scale of most of the pieces on Thursday's programme, as well as to the in-your-face style of the day's performer, Ortwin Sturmer.
Sturmer offered a pair of works by familiar names, Feldman and Scriabin, sandwiched between works by living composers of rather less eminence, Swede Johnny Grandert and the British-trained, Australia-resident Stephen Ingham.
The handling of the Feldman was extraordinary. Palais de Mari is one of those hauntingly quiet, not quite regularly patterned pieces that Feldman made so much his own. Yet Sturmer treated it with the angularity and dynamic extremes of 1950s serialism, ignoring the import of the printed score in a host of ways.
The Scriabin, too, was clearly an unequal struggle, though whether the pianist was more at odds with the composer or the piano remained unclear. Grandert's Digitazioni succumbed to the flavour of the day. And only the interaction of tape and live performance in Ingham's Van Horn Boogie found the normally estimable Sturmer in anything like his usual form.
