Reviews

Reviews today are Crash Ensemble Festival at the Project, Dublin and Robert O'Connor at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork

Crash Ensemble Festival

Project, Dublin

Michael Dervan

When the Crash Ensemble was founded, in 1997, it set out to bring a different flavour of programming to Irish listeners, with a concentration on challenging audiences through works that combine live performers with electronics and video. Last week's four-day festival followed the group's chosen path through a focus on work by Irish, US and Canadian composers.

The challenges were very real indeed, although it must be said that they were often experienced as a trial of patience. One of the highlights was Van Gogh, the 1991 video opera by the Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon, which the Crash Ensemble under Fergus Sheil premièred in a version for expanded ensemble.

The work sets words from the letters written by the artist Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. Text, music and video (the latter in the hands of Tim Redfern) floated on independent planes, with meandering vocal lines that seemed indifferent to the words they carried and heavily patterned instrumental writing that wore one down by its banality.

Gordon is well able to conceive first-rate ideas. His Decasia, "a large-scale symphony with projections", was heard as the soundtrack for the Bill Morrison film of the same name. Morrison provided video for the première of the symphony, and his movie, an assemblage of scenes on decaying nitrate film stock, was created and edited around the symphony itself, which was given its début by the Basel Sinfonietta under Kasper de Roo, former principal conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.

Though the film lacks the familiar fascination of exploring the ruins of buildings - which one can explore in one's own time and at one's own pace - there is clearly an intensified nostalgia in attempting to view fluidly flickering old images that are only partly decipherable. The music, with gapped glissandos of microtonal clusters that sound like weird, keening bagpipes, detuned pianos and punchy rock bass lines, creates a gripping sound world.

But at extremely high volume and in the small space of Project's Cube, Gordon's insistence on clobbering his listeners over and over with his mixture of heavy metal and Xenakis became oppressive, even claustrophobic. It can have surprised nobody that a number of people left before the screening was over.

Gordon was one of a number of Bang on a Can associates who engaged in pre-concert discussions. The most frustrating was between Willie White, Project's artistic director, who asked impenetrably polysyllabic and hyphenated-word questions, and the double bassist Robert Black, who endeavoured to give real-world answers.

The most productive was between John Godfrey of Crash and the pianist Lisa Moore, with Moore bringing her refreshing, analytic common sense to bear on her description of a career path that brought her unexpectedly into new music in her native Australia and, ultimately, to her present eminence in New York.

Her programme was devoted to the work of Frederic Rzewski. Now in his mid-60s, this politically motivated Massachusetts- born composer currently lives in Belgium. His four North American Ballads, from the late 1970s, are based on traditional American work and protest songs, and they marry a wide-ranging, polyglot, contemporary virtuosity (Rzewski was one of the first pianists to perform Stockhausen's Klavierstück X) to tuneful material. Piano Piece No 4, from the same period, buries a Chilean folk song in an anti-Pinochet protest. And the De Profundis of 1992, an unusual undertaking for a female performer, sets Oscar Wilde, writing to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol, in a typically eclectic manner that combines message and music with extraordinary power.

The festival included two string quartets each by the leading US minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The Callino Quartet undertook Reich's Triple Quartet and Different Trains, in performances where the expressive impact seemed limited by issues of balance between the electronics and the live performers rather than by the players. Both the Callinos and the visiting Bozzini Quartet, from Canada, took an approach to Glass (in Company and Mishima, respectively) that, as it were, unshackled the music. Both groups dispensed with straightness to admit some plain old expressive nudging and coaxing.

There wasn't much room for any of that in the Bozzini's performance of James Tenney's Koan, a 1984 reworking for string quartet of a 1971 composition for solo violin, in which a microtonal pattern of exploration is rigorously laid out and explored. There was a lot to be learned on the journey, even if its mode of progress seemed to overextend it.

The Bozzinis also offered Gerald Barry's 1998, a work commissioned for the 1999 West Cork Chamber Music Festival but never performed by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, which was scheduled to give the première. It's one of Barry's most perplexing pieces, a flow of fragmented material that somehow just stands there, as if frozen at the moment of its utterance. Barry's recycling of the work for violin and piano was heard in Dublin in 2000. The quartet original certainly has the edge in terms of textural interest. But even as a string quartet it stands as a rarity in Barry's output: a work that almost steps back from the listener.

The conceptual artist Hanne Darboven's Opus 17A for solo double bass (Robert Black) doesn't quite do that, but one could be forgiven for wishing it did. This marathon of a piece consists of arpeggio figurations that proceed in regular motion (if not quite regular patterns), unbroken for well over an hour. Its unbending nature is a major part of its fascination and at the same time a major barrier to any rewarding musical outcome.

Among the new works at the festival, both Jürgen Simpson's Six, for video (Simon Doyle), live electronics, percussion (Richard Benjafield) and tape, and Judith Ring's Phorm, for saxophone (André Leroux) and tape, stumbled in the combination of live performer and electronics, with the latter sounding the more persuasive. Doyle's abstract video had a combination of rigour and fluidity that's unusual in this area of enterprise.

Andrew Hamilton's I Like Things, performed by Crash, matched its childish title (text by Martin Creed) with childish musical treatment, and Justin Carroll's Helicopter Duo for tape and two loudspeaker-whirling performers (the composer and Roy Carroll) recreated the phase effects that in the predigital era used to be provided by loudspeakers rotating in front of a stationary microphone.

Elsewhere, in pieces new and old, musical substance was often thin on the ground, with too many of the pieces showing a tendency to milk their ideas and material for more than they were worth. It was the great irony of the programme that, in a festival mounted by an ensemble exploring new media, the greatest musical rewards came from string quartets and solo piano.

Robert O'Connor

Triskel Arts Centre, Cork

Mark Ewart

The spaces we inhabit are not usually of concern to the artist, as the people inside tend to be far more interesting than the four walls alone.

Historically, however, there is a precedent for recognising

that the absence of figures within a painting can be just a powerful as

their presence: the romantics, for example, knew all about the beauty of isolation.

Robert O'Connor's photographs in Terrestrial, his current exhibition, remind me of this sensibility somewhat, as he gravitates toward spaces that are devoid of direct human presence. The settings are taken in and around the industrial zones of Sardinia, shot during darkness, with atmospheric lighting revealing minimal detail of minimalist places.

There is a definite suggestion of menace in these photographs, especially those images that appear to be taken from a half-hidden alcove or annexe. The premise is that danger is lurking around the next corner or that the viewfinder is the eye of a protagonist about to commit some sinister act. More innocently, the images are reminiscent of the environments created in 3D computer games.

Eschewing such interpretations, however, leads the viewer to assume O'Connor is drawn to a matter-of-fact realism embraced by many contemporary practitioners. But I feel that although the photographs do have a sterile, almost detached ambivalence, a subtext remains.

The structure of 20:19:59, for example, is essentially just an innocent service kiosk with its shutters locked down for the night. But O'Connor has imbued this everyday item with an iconic threatening presence more akin to that of a military bunker or silo. It's the ambiguity that gives this show its edge.

Runs until December 18th