Pascal Gallois

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

French bassoonist Pascal Gallois makes high art out of the very noises players of conventional music work hard to avoid. Before his recital, you might have doubted that this usually circumspect instrument could keep you interested, all by itself, for a whole hour. Afterwards, you might have asked yourself why it isn’t generally held to be the supreme acoustic medium of the avant-garde.

Such are the subtleties of Gallois’s technique that it would be unfair to describe the resulting sonic complexities as merely experimental. Be they shuddering overtones, rasping multiphonics, or simply the toneless rush of unobstructed breath, the effect is always decisive.

To capitalise on possibilities such as these is arguably the greatest challenge to have faced composers in recent decades, and it’s no surprise that works have been written or at least arranged specially for Gallois by the leading avant-gardists Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio. To be represented in this programme, then, was a signal honour for composer Jesse Ronneau, lecturer in music at NUI Maynooth.

Least persuasive, perhaps, were two transcribed items by György Kurtág. The naive descending scales of In memoriam György Kroó(1997) sacrificed some of the plasticity of the viola or cello versions, while János Pilinszky: Gérard de Nerval (1986) proved less engrossing than its model, the sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite, which Gallois threw in by way of illustration.

Olga Neuwirth's Torsion(2002) and Ronneau's Portée(2012) pursued impressive explorations of Gallois's colouristic resources. Yet Johannes Maria Staud's Celluloid(2011) managed to do more than just that, its series of keenly characterised textures sending the mind off on a quest for corresponding images.

In contrast, an entirely self-contained experience was presented by the entry penned specially for Gallois in Berio's prestigious series of instrumental solos, Sequenza XII(1995) – a work so utterly certain of its own trajectory that it held the attention as with an iron grasp.