Flamboyant exercises in guitar playing

Boyle Arts Festival has been making a feature of one-man composer concerts (yes, they've all been men, so far) and the focus of this year's attention was Benjamin Dwyer. Dwyer, now in his mid-30s, is well-known as a performer, too, and his own instrument, the guitar, featured strongly in the Boyle programme. He's been engaged for a number of years on a series of guitar studies, flamboyant technical exercises which when he plays them himself make an immediate appeal through their virtuosity and the range of guitar styles they call on.

Omeros (1994) for an amplified group of four vocalising guitarists (Aran Corcoran, Alan Grundy, Dave Kelly and the composer) has more than a tinge of minimalism to it. The Trio No 1 (Quasi una Fantasia) of 1995, for clarinet, violin and piano (Deirdre O'Leary, Katie O'Connor and David Adams), inhabits a world of rather more severe abstraction (which it has in common with the Three Piano Pieces of 1997), and the 1994 Sonata for flute and guitar (Susan Doyle with the composer) shares vivid material with one of the guitar studies.

The most recent work, Crow, for amplified tenor recorder (Peter Wells) and tape, was completed earlier this year. It has a high shock value and its explosive opening left a number of individuals around me visibly trembling. Crow shares the go-for-it immediacy which is one of the hallmarks of Dwyer's output. In a world where electro-acoustic music is becoming ever more complex in processing, this work showed aspects of directness which made it sound almost old-fashioned. Shock-value or no, it didn't work as well as the pieces in which the concerns were purely instrumental.