A period of transition

The Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music in Belfast is a valuable event, but this was far from a vintage year, writes Michael Dervan

The Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music in Belfast, founded in 1981, is the longest-running event of its type in Ireland.

Over the years, Sonorities has been a sort of chameleon, changing shape and size to match fluctuations in available resources as well as the musical tastes of its various directors.

Programming used to be under the overall direction of the Queen's University composer-in-residence. Since the disappearance of that position in 1997 it reverted to Michael Alcorn, a one-time Queen's composer-in-residence who was then a university lecturer and is now director of Queen's new Sonic Arts Research Centre. This year, for the first time, the festival programming was in the hands of Paul Wilson, another Queen's-based composer who is currently a teaching fellow in music technology at the university.

The theme of this year's festival was the human voice, with concerts by two ensembles (Trio Mediaeval and Singcircle), one by a soloist (Steve Halfyard), and two programmes of electro-acoustic music influenced by or using the voice.

It was particularly interesting to hear the Scandinavian voices of Trio Mediaeval - a five-year old group of three unamplified sopranos inspired by the Hilliard Ensemble, working in a repertoire which ranges from the medieval to the contemporary - in close conjunction with the technology-heavy standard vocal quartet of Singcircle, founded 26 years ago by Gregory Rose, and still best-known for its performances of Stockhausen's Stimmung, a piece which it has performed over 50 times.

Trio Mediaeval's style is light and free, their pitching is clean, their sound chastely beautiful. Their repertoire, too, sounds light, and all of a piece, the modern pieces seeming to aspire to the condition of the early music. The group's style almost defines itself by what it has left out, ditching certain musical baggage much as nouvelle cuisine ditched heavy sauces and fatty ingredients. And, like certain kinds of nouvelle cuisine, it's the presentation which leaves the most enduring impression.

The group's repertoire in Belfast included pieces by Ivan Moody, Piers Hellawell, Thoma Simaku, Paul Robinson, Bjørn Kruse and Andrew Smith, but it was the performances which impressed rather than the music, save for the interspersed 13th-century Laudes, where an extra dimension became apparent.

Singcircle, who offered a late-night programme of Michael Alcorn, Cathy Berberian, Kaija Saariaho, Simon Emmerson, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi, sounded, by comparison, tired and unconvincing.

It was extraordinary how this once-celebrated group seemed to have lost all sense of sharpness and precision, with voices scooping up to initial notes that needed to be taken cleanly and, frequently, giving an air of going through the motions.

Steve Halfyard, a singer who also works with electronics, communicated with a greater sense of presence and animation, though her performance of the first movement of Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate , while a tour de force in itself, didn't manage to provide any of the sense of form that makes this nearly 80-year-old work such a remarkable piece; the performance wasn't helped by tricksy manipulation of artificial reverberation.

Paul Wilson's Spiritus, inspired by a photograph of an apparition, takes a trek through a catalogue of eerie music clichés, all very well done, but leaving one with the question, "Why?"

And the water-saturated Nekyia by Joseph Hyde and Alaric Sumner, complete with video, embedded texts and well as live performers, turned out to be among the most astonishingly pretentious pieces I've heard in a long time.

The vocal focus added greatly to the interest of the two electro-acoustic programmes. But the problem which dogged this year's Sonorities programme was here epitomised: too much low-quality music.

and multi-media composers are, naturally enough, renowned for their open perspectives. But often

they make the rash assumption that finding a subject of substance will translate readily into music of solid content.

Roger Doyle's The Idea and Its Shadow translates the resonances of its simple idea into a highly effective piece, and a section from Fôret profonde by veteran Francis Dhomont held the attention with the sophistication of its texture and pitch manipulation.

Instrumental recitals opened and closed the festival, pianist Rolf Hind offering Salvatore Sciarrino's Second Sonata as well as the gross, naive and exhilarating battering ram of Brian Bolger's Phyla Cordata.

Percussionist Colin Currie offered the exciting rhythmic intricacies of Per Nørgård's Fire over Water and Iannis Xenakis's Rebonds B as well as some more lightweight folksy pieces. But, overall, this was far from a vintage year in the history of this valuable festival.

Vindobona Trio Hugh Lane Gallery

Trio No. 1 in E flat . . . . . . . . . . . . . Berwald

Trio in C minor, Op. 101 . . . . . . . . . Brahms

Three Tangos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Piazzolla

Vindobona Trio (Eyal Kless, violin; Eckart Schwarz Schulz, cello; Réamonn Keary, piano) presented the first of three recitals which feature the Trios of Berwald and Brahms in the Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday.

Berwald (1796-1868) was not highly esteemed by the public of his own time, neither in his native Sweden nor anywhere else, though he was praised by Mendelssohn and Listz; but there has been a revival of interest in his music of late, now reaching our shores.

The Vindobona Trio were most persuasive advocates of Berwald's Trio No 1 and made one wonder at the comparative neglect of this pleasing music. It is in a classical mode but is free of that sometimes oppressive high-mindedness of the German school.

Brahms can oppress in the wrong hands, but the Vindobona's performance was full of warmth and energy, making the Trio in C minor a life-affirmative utterance and ensuring that the composer's exploration of his themes never sounded long-winded.

The special atmosphere of Piazzolla's Tangos, their mixture of the Old World and the New World with a hint of modern astringency, was conveyed with rhythmic fluidity and the rich tunefulness was particularly evident in the passages for solo cello. - Douglas Sealy

The Kiss Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

In almost 50 years of opera-going, I have never before seen a leading tenor character make his first entrance carrying an infant in his arms. But that is how the libretto of Bedrich Smetana's The Kiss has it, and that is how director Nicola Raab stages it in her lucid production for Opera Theatre Company. Said infant, played by a well-behaved doll, is the son of the young widower whose rejected plea for a kiss from his intended second wife is at the heart of the slender plot.

Dating from 1876, when the composer was completely deaf, The Kiss was the seventh of Smetana's nine operas. OTC's touring version drops the chorus, conflates two of the lesser roles and uses Mark Armstrong's six-instrument reduction of the orchestral score. If this results in a sound that lies somewhere between a chamber ensemble and a café orchestra, it is consistently well played and adroitly paced by David Adams, who directs from the keyboard.

As the coy Vendulka, Virginia Kerr is in sovereign voice. Her two lullabies are movingly sung and her confrontations with her kiss-seeking swain are firmly controlled and cleanly articulated. Indeed, the words come across clearly from all the cast. Michelle Sheridan sings the maid Barce with bright, rich soprano tone; and Frances McCafferty's fruity contralto fills out the role of the smuggling aunt Martinka admirably.

Eugene Ginty, as Lukás, lacks nothing in projection, but his lightish tenor voice tightens under pressure. The lower male roles are strongly sung and acted by baritones Andrew Rupp and Andrew Slater and the sonorous bass Deryck Hamon. Joanna Parker's period costumes and wooden-slatted set, imaginatively lit by Kevin Treacy, are good to look at and effectively reflect the folksy ethos of the piece.

The Kiss is at Town Hall Galway tomorrow (091 569777) and Mullingar Arts Centre on Saturday (044 47777). The tour continues until May 18th -John Allen