Ergodos Voices

NCH, Dublin

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly — The Sun Also Rises (exc).

Garrett Sholdice — For magister Léonin. Seán Clancy — Comedias Nuevas.

Judith Ring — Mouthpiece.

Linda Buckley — Núrarimur.

THE CONTRASTS of scale between Friday’s Aida at the O2 and Saturday’s début programme by the new all-female vocal quartet, Ergodos Voices, were so great that it was curious to realise that there was an important common denominator between the two. Both were reliant on amplification, but the involvement of electronics in the work of Ergodos Voices was there from the outset, not only for the performers but also for the composers.

Ergodos Voices is an international group, the four singers (Peyee Chen, soprano, Marja Liisa Kay, soprano, Michelle O’Rourke, mezzo soprano, Robin Bier, alto) having in common their involvement with the University of York and their wide-ranging personal interests.

These run from the ornamentation of early music, English Restoration odes and baroque music, to jazz and contemporary music.

All of Saturday’s music was by Irish composers. Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s The Sun Also Rises is a piece for chamber ensemble and film and the concert featured a number of short interludes from it, the film presenting images of fields and water in the manner of a pre- video home movie, the music cast as a kind of modern choral recitative.

Think of an updating of Allegri’s Miserere, complete with 21st-century stratospheric solos, and you’ll be on the right lines.

Garrett Sholdice’s For Magister Léonin is one of a set of pieces inspired by the early polyphony of the 12th-century composer Léonin (a name often paired in history books with the slightly later Pérotin).

Sholdice’s work for three voices pares down and focuses the ear on pure, simple moments, a note, an interval, a chord and accumulates interest by accumulating complexity as it proceeds.

Seán Clancy’s Comedias Nuevas is an ambitious theatrical piece for three voices, which has the singers melodramatically throwing sheets of music in the air, chanting, clapping, mumbling, making animal noises, and crouching in contorted positions.

On a first hearing, its shock value was diminished by what sounded like a very raw revisiting of attitudes that informed various strands of what presented itself as advanced music in the 1960s.

Judith Ring’s Mouthpiece has been presented before as a tape piece, assembled from unprocessed recordings of the voice of mezzo soprano Natasha Lohan.

Ergodos Voices’ Irish member Michelle O’Rourke performed the work in an alternative version for live voice and tape.

Curiously the drama and surprise of the work seemed more limited by the addition of the live performer.

The concert closed with a new work by Linda Buckley. Núrarimur, for two voices which was inspired by Icelandic epic poetry. It’s a work of slow, rolling beauty, with what you might call futuristic echo-chamber effects, and just when it seemed to be about to go on too long, it stopped.

The performances by Ergodos Voices may have included some rough edges (particularly as regards smooth continuity of tone). However much of the music-making was well polished, and their sense of adventure bodes well for the future.