Carving out true experimentation within the NCH

The return of the Crash Ensemble to the National Concert Hall with their Free State programme gives new Irish music a great platform – but who is really taking the risk?

ANYONE FOR real tennis? This was a question for the National Concert Hall back in the late 1990s, when the hall and the Office of Public Works announced plans to convert a real tennis court on its Earlsfort Terrace site into a 320-seat recital hall.

The historic, late-19th-century tennis court had been in use by UCD as an engineering laboratory (and before that as a gymnasium), and the university’s staggered relocation from Earlsfort Terrace had made the premises available for new uses.

I was taken around the building and given a sales pitch about the project by representatives of the OPW and the NCH. The NCH even distributed a flyer with architectural drawings for the conversion, explaining that the hall “urgently requires a second music space for the development of chamber music, education and outreach events and smaller concert events”.

The OPW, explained the flyer, “has identified the former gymnasium building, adjacent to the National Concert Hall, on Earlsfort Terrace as a suitable location.” (It’s the red-brick building you encounter on your right before the first NCH entrance, as you approach the hall from St Stephen’s Green.)

The failure to mention the original purpose of the building was a ruse that failed completely. Real tennis, in which the ball can bounce off the side walls as well as the floor of the court, is the game from which the lawn tennis we know today developed. Its fans created a small but well-organised and internationally supported lobby group which took to the courts, issued regular missives on the progress of its campaign, and persisted long enough to ensure that the idea of the new recital hall would ultimately peter out.

The OPW/NCH promise was for a “sensitive, meticulous conservation” of the building. The sensitivity of the proposed development was accepted by An Taisce, but that organisation still took the side of the pro-tennis lobby, on the basis that the original use should prevail, and also expressed concerns about the “reversibility of works”.

The pitch that was made to me was not just about the desirability of the new space for smaller concerts, but also about the hall’s interest in innovative and experimental programming. The name that came up more than any other as novel and exciting was that of the Crash Ensemble, the new music group that was founded in 1997.

I’ve often thought about the nature of that pitch in the years since then. If the hall was so intent on a new style of programming, how come it never used any of its existing spaces in this way? If it was so set on working with the Crash Ensemble, how come that, after two Crash concerts at the NCH in 1999 and 2000, there were no return appearances?

Both issues of course have now been addressed. The Kevin Barry Room – the name given to some interlinking former lecture rooms on the first floor over the main foyer of the NCH – has for the last three years or so provided the kind of experimental space that the hall had so long lacked.

It’s not a perfect solution, by any means. The acoustic is dry. Sound insulation is minimal so that noise from road traffic and even interval smokers from concerts in the main auditorium can be seriously intrusive. But the presence of a Steinway concert grand is a great boon, and the venue has become a major focus for a range of music-making that doesn’t have a ready home elsewhere in the capital.

But in one key respect Kevin Barry Room concerts are just like most other concerts at the NCH. The hall itself is not the promoter, it’s just a facilitator, administering a receiving venue. It doesn’t originate concerts that take place in the Kevin Barry Room. Like the proverbial parish priest, it’s just making the hall available.

And the Crash Ensemble’s return to Earlsfort Terrace, which took place last Thursday, “in association with the National Concert Hall,” had something of the same air about it. Since 2006, Crash have presented annual programmes of works by emerging composers under the banner “Free State”. It was the seventh of these which the group gave on Thursday. So, rather than engaging in its own innovative or experimental programming, the NCH has just, as it were, taken a stake in what somebody else was already doing.

The upside is that it’s good for Crash to be involved with the state’s major classical venue, through which it benefits from wider publicity, broadens its potential audiences, and gets the opportunity to play in a large concert hall. It’s good that the NCH has shown initiative in partnering with one of Ireland’s leading new music groups. But the collaboration has not actually resulted in any extra activity.

The Free State programme would have happened anyway. It’s just that this year it’s been given at the NCH. It’s to be hoped that the hall’s new director, Simon Taylor, not yet a year in his post, will find something original to promote in the way of new music before too long. And it’s to be hoped, too, that if the NCH does get the recital hall it still desires – by converting the former medical library on the far side of the main stairs from the John Field Room – that it will be more than just another receiving venue.

And what of Thursday’s programme itself? Crash invited Andrew Hamilton to curate it, and it fell to him to work through 103 scores submitted by composers “from or based in Ireland” to present what Crash publicity called “the future of New Music in Ireland”.

The 11 composers represented (Irene Buckley, Daniel McDermott, Garrett Sholdice, Sebastian Adams, Enda Bates, Donal Sarsfield, Emma O’Halloran, Conal Ryan, Eric Egan, Jonathan Nangle, Alex Dowling) work across a widely varied range of styles.

The sparest sounds came from Garrett Sholdice’s Tanka for Aki Takahashi, a slow, soft piano solo, haunted by Schubert. Eric Egan’s Non-Stable Equilibrium, for violin and piano, offered some of the evening’s densest and busiest writing, but also one of the clearest compositional strategies, which involved a teasing balance between predictability and unpredictability.

Sebastian Adams’s Miniature for cello and piano takes a transformative course with nervousness and obsession. And Donal Sarsfield’s Everybody knows Everything for piano quartet (the title a quotation from Morton Feldman, which is played back during the piece as read in the resonant tones of fellow composer Gerald Barry) is an often cross-purposes dialogue between piano and strings that’s both witty and oblique.

Peter Tuite (Hugh Lane Gallery, Sunday) gave the second in the series of complete Haydn piano sonatas that he’s sharing this year and next with Fionnuala Moynihan.

He’s a player who shows a lot of virtues in this under-explored repertoire. He has a rock-solid sense of rhythm. It’s a gift that allows him to integrate elaborate flourishes with a perfect sense of balance, helps him present Haydn’s witty indulgences with straight-faced ease, and probe the depths of the composer’s slow movement with real expressiveness, all in spite of the fact that he can show moments of capriciousness with the composer’s actual text.

The surprise of the day was that he sounded at his weakest in the best-known of the sonatas that he offered (Hob XVI: 23 in F), as if he had dropped his normal concern for precision of detail and voicing when playing it. He was at his best in another Sonata in F (Hob XVI: 29), where he invested the slow movement with real pathos.

The series continues, with a recital by Fionnuala Moynihan, on Sunday, June 3rd.