Wrath or Singing - Sharon Zhu
4+6vu - Padraig Sheridan
The Red Thread - John McLachlan
Seachanges (with Danse Macabre - Raymond Deane
Scenes from Crow - Benjamin Dwyer
Composer Benjamin Dwyer, artistic director of the Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern series, and founder of the Vox21 ensemble, is engrossed with the poetry of Ted Hughes. The musical outcome over the last few years has been a number of Crow pieces, which have now grown to form the seven-movement Scenes from Crow for amplified septet and tape.
The premiere was given at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre on Thursday evening. The work's sections are billed as "scenes". The description makes sense, for there is in what Dwyer has written something of the feel of incidental music. Words - and other vocal sounds - feature in his atmospheric creation, but not really as a text conventionally sung or set.
Voices, whether live or on tape, are used suggestively. And the music is suggestive, too, with rumbling electronic threats and sometimes violent assaults from the instruments.
The suggestiveness is at once the music's strength and its weakness. It moodily invites the listener to follow where it leads, but at the same time seems to need something outside itself as a focus or anchor.
The other premiere of the evening was John McLachlan's The Red Thread for guitar and tape, a work with a well-thought-out strategy which was let down by the drawn-out nature of its implementation as well as material that was wrung for rather more than it could yield.
McLachlan's imitative ploys were not the only ones on the programme. Siobhan Cleary's Petering Out transforms the potential of the sopranino recorder through the use of live electronics, which can multiply a single line like a controllable crazy mirror.
In spite of the title, the music is slow to warm into action and is at its best when at its liveliest. Padraig Sheridan's 4+6vu for flute and clarinet, winner of the Irish section of the Mostly Modern/AIC young composers' competition, is like a chasing game which treats the instruments as cartoon characters making periodic outlandish stretches.
Sharon Zhu's Wrath or Singing for piano trio, winner of the international section, chose the difficult path of marrying old expressive needs to new discordance, but did not manage to make either sound at all convincing.
And in the small confines of the Bank of Ireland venue, Raymond Deane's blackly inspired but brightly lit Sea changes (with Danse Macabre) brought touches of the aural equivalent of squinting in the sun.
