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Brian Farrell
Reviews
The Irish Examiner
"Diverse concert brings a new listening thrill"
The year old new music ensemble VOX21 highlighted an old but on going musical issue in its recent evening concert in the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre's Mostly Modern series. The issue, which emerged from a nicely diverse programme comprising mostly Irish composers, concerns external reference in music.
The opening work made no overt reference to anything outside itself. Listening to Petering Out by Dubliner Siobhán Cleary is like not being able to resist eavesdropping on an animated conversation, in this case between a sopranino recorder, performed with virtuosity and flair by dedicatee Peter Wells, and the varied imitative and responsive distortions electronically manufactured by Cleary. The same absence of outside reference prevailed in 4+6vu, winner of this year's Mostly Modern Young Irish Composers' competition, by Cavan's Padraig Sheridan. It's an engaging piece for clarinet and flute, using Baroque techniques ostinatos, canons and hochets within a modern idiom.
Other works in the concert made extra musical references. The dichotomy implied in Wrath or Singing winner of the competition's international class is described by Shanghai born Sharon Zhu, as "the two ends of the spectrum". Whatever this may mean, a clear cut polarity was delineated by the use of two contrasted tempos in an eclectic, stop and go piece for piano, violin and cello.
The extra musical abounds in Raymond Deane's Seachanges (with Danse Macabre). Death, which Deane treats with irreverence, is the main reference point, the title alluding to "full fathom five" from Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the music incorporating the symbol laden Dies irae plainsong alongside jaunty mariachi band style, a reference to the gaudy morbidity of Mexican iconography. The piece dwells with unusual tenderness upon a simple, pentatonic tune before Deane drives his death material to an abrasive conclusion.
In his Scenes from Crow, the world premiere for amplified ensemble and tape which occupied the concert's second half, Benjamin Dwyer develops his abstract responses to the hard hitting Crow poetry of Ted Hughes (1930 1998). The richly varied music conveys impressions, with varying degrees of subtlety, of Hughes's preoccupation with the natural world.
Michael Dungan
Bank of Ireland Arts Centre
Siobhán Cleary: Petering Out
Sharon Zhu: Wrath or Singing
Padraig Sheridan: 4+6vu
John McLachlan: The Red Thread
Raymond Deane: Seachanges (with Danse macabre)
Benjamin Dwyer Scenes from Crow (World Première) (for amplified ensemble
and tape)
Scenes from Crow Benjamin Dwyer Composer Benjamin 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....McLachlan's imitative ploys were not the only ones on the programme. Siobhán Cleary's Patenting Out transforms the potential of the sopranino recorder through the use of live electronics, which can multiply a single line like a controllable crazy minor.
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...
... in the small confines of the Bank of Ireland venue, Raymond Deane's blackly-inspired but brightly-lit Seachanges (with Dame Macabre) brought touches of the aural equivalent of squinting in the sun.
Michael Dervan
DIT~Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern Festival
"VOX21 performed with youthful verve and
made all the music immediately accessible".
The final concert in last week's Mostly Modern Festival was confined to two composers of very different styles, both Italian. Giacinto Scelsi, who died in 1998, explored a narrow range of pitches than dynamics, seldom allowing the instruments to stray far from a shared pitch or move swiftly, and yet, as in Elegia per Ty ( violin, cello) and Ko-Lho (flute, clarinet), the slowly intertwined lines grabbed he attention like a rainbow seen at night, its colours dim and different from normal.
Hyxos for alto flute and percussion was a pastoral evocation with a flavour of the antique world, less characteristic style, but as un-emphatic and meditative as the other pieces.The addition of a voice to instruments in Manto (soprano, flute, trombone, cello) brought a little touch of the operatic, but again nothing much seemed to happen. The lack of incident was however, more compelling the sometimes too active noisy music of the others.
The second composer was Luciano Berio, who wished to open up the world of music. Why should a voice be limited to operaticanas when it can shout and cough and sob and grabble as well? In her performance of Sequenza III (voice) Judith Mok did all those things with an intensity which did not detract from the occasional moments of comedy.
Gesti (recorder), played by Peter Wells, attempted a similar feat with that normally refined instrument, but couldn't match Sequenza III. Opus Number Zoo (wind quintet), in which the instrumentalists, whenever they have a rest, recite a narrative about animals, kept the audience laughing and ended with a distinct "miaou". In a totally different vein was the setting of three poems from Joyce's "Chamber Music" (soprano, harp, Clarinet); Berio can illustrate in sound as well as any mode of the old romantics.
Douglas Sealy
The Irish Times
VOX21 & Judith Mok (Soprano)
Bank of Ireland Arts Centre
Louis Andriessen: Zilver
Louis Andriessen: Worker's Union
Theo Loevendie: Cycles
Theo Loevendie:Turkish Folkpoems
A GOOD PROGRAMME and engaging performances made last
Thursday night's concert in the Mostly Modem series at the Bank of Ireland
Arts Centre in Dublin a winner.
Judith Mok (soprano) joined VOX21 to present four works by two Dutch composers
born in the 1930, Theo Loevendie and Louis Andriessen.
Workers' Union, composed in 1975 and scored for any loud-sounding group of instruments, is one of Andriessen's best-known pieces.
On this occasion, a line-up of flute, oboe, clarinet, cello, violin and percussion (two players) was not as loud as some might have wished, or as aggressive as the composer says the piece should be.
But David Brophy conducted with a firm sense of shaping and the performance lived up to the composer's declaration that each musician must play "with such an intention that his part is an essential one".
That could be said of the entire concert, which Included Andriessen's Zilver (1994) and Loevendie's Cycles (1992).
Kenneth Edge conducted these two works, which show, in differing ways, their composers' early interests in music outside the classical tradition, especially in jazz. But there the similarities end.
Andriessen is a conceptualist of the most rugged kind,
whose compositions have the sort of single-mindedness which can attract or
repel but cannot be ignored.
Loevendie is a sensualist, but without self-Indulgence. His Six Turkish Folkpoems
(1977) are masterly in their use of Eastern vocal Idioms.
The music's links to the elaboration and complexity
of the 1950 and '60. avant-garde, a forbidding control of detail and structure,
are part of a discipline which enables the composer to borrow without any
suggestion of dependence or Imitation.
That, and the superb singing of soprano Judith Mok, made this work the highlight
of the evening.
Martin Adams
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