Museum pieces

Dublin-born clarinettist Carol McGonnell makes a welcome return home with the Music for Museums concert series that she masterminded, writes Michael Dervan

Clarinettist Carol McGonnell has spent most of her adult life away from her native Dublin. First she chose to study music at Queen's University Belfast. She then relocated to Germany, where she opted for the Musikhochschule in Frankfurt. And after that she crossed the Atlantic to New York, where she studied at the Manhattan School of Music, and where she now lives and works.

The last few years have seen her increasing her profile back in Ireland.

She was the Music Network's 2003 choice for their professional development programme, Young Musicwide. In the same year she was invited by the RTÉ NSO's principal conductor, Gerhard Markson, to play Pierre Boulez's Dialogue de l'ombre double for solo clarinet and electronics, as one of the unusual couplings he chose for his cycle of the Bruckner symphonies. She has struck up musical partnerships with violinist Catherine Leonard, pianists Finghin Collins and Hugh Tinney, and last year curated the classical music programme of Kilkenny Arts Festival.

HER LATEST PROJECT is altogether larger in scale. She's masterminded a Music for Museums concert series that will play in the National Gallery in Dublin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

She traces the genesis of the project back to Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett. "There's a very fine string quartet based in New York called the Flux Quartet. I heard their performance of Morton Feldman's Second String Quartet, the one that lasts six hours, and became very interested in working with them.

"When last year's Beckett centenary celebrations were announced, I saw there was possibly an opportunity to do something in relation to music and Beckett. I asked the Flux if we could figure out a programme with connections to Beckett." They did, bringing together quartets by Philip Glass and John Cage, and Morton Feldman's Clarinet and String Quartet.

"We proposed it all to the National Gallery, and Orla O'Brien of the gallery's development office picked up on it, and that started a connection between myself and the gallery.

"We decided that it would be nice to continue working together. She asked me for some ideas, and I thought it would be fantastic to do a collaboration between museums in the United States and the National Gallery, to forge links between these institutions on either side of the Atlantic.

"Since I have a very good connection with Scott Nickrenz, who runs the music series at the Gardner Museum in Boston, and he had been speaking about doing something together for a while, I asked him if he would be interested in having one concert at the Gardner. The Gardner music series is very well respected in the United States, and once they were involved, it was quite easy to get other people on board. Then the Getty signed up, and I've a friend who runs the Metropolitan Artists in Concert in New York, Edward Arron, and he was delighted to participate."

Metropolitan Artists in Concert is the talented young ensemble in residence at the Metropolitan Museum. McGonnell herself joins them for the opening concert in Dublin, and the closing concert in New York next May. In between are concerts by the Irish Baroque Orchestra under Monica Huggett (Boston and Dublin), soprano Aylish Tynan with pianist Hugh Tinney (Dublin and Los Angeles), and two US groups visiting Dublin for the first time in December, the Knights Chamber Orchestra, and the Argento Chamber Ensemble.

MCGONNELL'S CLOSEST INVOLVEMENT is with the Argento, of which she is a founder member. "Our ensemble, which is now seven years old, is primarily interested in cutting-edge European contemporary music, although we're broadening our focus now and we're very interested in finding emerging composers from North and South America and Asia, wherever we can find them. Up till now our concentration has mainly been on French spectral music. We've done a lot of Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey and their contemporaries."

The European focus is rather unusual for a New York ensemble. "And it can also be very difficult, because in the States they're very interested in promoting and sponsoring American contemporary music. So it's quite challenging for us to find the means of funding what we do." In spite of that, the group did manage to record a debut CD of pieces by Murail. Reviewing it in New York Times, Steve Smith described the group as specialising "in toothier strains of contemporary composition", adding, "it renders them not merely approachable but positively delectable through its mix of technical command and urgent advocacy".

McGonnell says her appetite for contemporary music was first developed by composer Piers Hellawell at Queen's University Belfast. While still in Germany she played in Ensemble Modern on their Roaring Eisler CD under HK Gruber, and in the last two months she has premiered new works by Derek Ball and Ian Wilson in a contemporary Irish composer showcase at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, and played in a Gerald Barry portrait concert at Miller Theatre. All in all, she figures, she's played in the world premiere of close to a hundred works.

She may well have been spared a career as an orchestral musician by the fact that her study in Germany - which was encouraged by her clarinet teacher in Dublin, Brian O'Rourke - landed her in a country where she effectively played the wrong instrument.

"In Germany," she explains, "I couldn't do any orchestral auditions. I actually sent my resumé to the Berlin Philharmonic at one point. They sent it back, stamped 'French system clarinettists need not apply'." (German system clarinets have a different bore or internal shape to French ones, and the fingering is also different.) "I did think about changing to the German system, but I was very happy with a French system clarinet, and ultimately felt it would limit the possibilities later on if I changed to German.

"Interestingly, I've now just started to play a clarinet that's being developed by Yamaha, it's a custom-made clarinet, which has the internal dimensions of a German instrument, but with French-system fingering. It's the first time that these two systems have been married in a successful way." For the listener, she says, the differences between the two styles of clarinet are audible, but not actually as significant as the difference in style between individual players.

APART FROM THE Music for Museums project, the work that currently gets her most excited is one called simply The Academy, a programme run by Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.

"I got a call from Carnegie Hall this time last year, to ask me if I would be interested being one of 16 musicians involved in the pilot programme for this new project. Basically, we perform together on a regular basis at Carnegie Hall and also at Juilliard, and also give smaller chamber concerts.

"There's a career development aspect, too. We've met the financial people from Carnegie and Juilliard to talk about budgets, endowments, funding. We had advice from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on how to run a music series; Ara Guzelimian, dean of the Juilliard and former artistic adviser at Carnegie, about programming; [and from] people from PR companies, artist agencies and so on. I've even been to talk to a board meeting of Carnegie Hall, sitting beside Yo-Yo Ma, and across from Renée Fleming."

But there's another aspect of the programme that she seems to find even more stimulating. "We go in to work with New York City public school kids. The poorest, most disadvantaged schools have been targeted by the programme. This was initially the part I was least interested in being involved in. The time commitment in teaching had always put me off. You need to be available for students on a regular basis, and considering the fact that I travel a lot, I was a bit concerned about it.

"However, without a doubt, it's actually the most rewarding part. I have a school that I go to in east Harlem, Public School 46. I work with fifth and sixth graders, aged nine or 10. We're helping to build these children's confidence, which often is quite low, and give them attention that they otherwise wouldn't get, and hopefully give them a love for music. It's working really well. We got six of our kids into Juilliard's Saturday morning Music Advancement Programme, where the kids go from 8am until 3pm. It's just brilliant."

Carol McGonnell and Metropolitan Artists in Concert play Haydn, Carter, Copland and Schumann, at the National Gallery on at 8pm on Fri