Béal Festival

Various venues, Dublin

The new, two-day Béal Festival set out to explore “the strange territory where text and music meet”. What’s new, here, you might wonder? Text and music have been meeting as long as people have been singing songs.

But text and music do continue to meet in new ways. Witness the surreal effects of Gerald Barry's Schott and Sons, Mainz(setting letters from Beethoven to his publisher for bass and choir), or the excerpt from Beat Furrer's Fama, which set part of Arthur Schnitzler's Fräulein Elsafor actress and contrabass flute, and was performed by the duo Contra Culture at a New Sound Worlds concert last December.

The specific interest of Béal’s founders, soprano Elizabeth Hilliard and composer/keyboard player David Bremner, is the ability of the word “both sung and spoken, to range between pure information and pure sound”.

The programme chose to focus on new work, to put poets on stage to read during the concerts, and in one case to provide a reading with a backdrop of improvising musicians.

The compositional approaches varied hugely. Donal Sarsfield's Gerard Manley Hopkins setting Repeat That, Repeat,performed by a confident Milltown Chamber Choir under Orla Flanagan, came across as a choral showpiece, pure and simple, a gleeful, playful, if over-long response to the words.

Gráinne Mulvey's Dead Earth, a choral setting of works by Alfonsina Storni, was full of keening effects.

A number of works invoked electronics. Jonathan Nangle's Then Falls Thy Shadow, a choral treatment of words by Ernest Dowson, backed the choir with its pre-recorded self, the background material playing in random order to guarantee a shifting, unpredictable shadowiness.

In a concert of works for soprano and clarinet (resourceful duo Elizabeth Hilliard and Paul Roe), Fergal Dowling's Still, Elisionsadded live processing into the mix, so that the performers could be heard in a multitude of spatially dispersed layers against their earlier selves.

Ian Wilson used electronics in Ballad of Breath and Sleepingto provide extra layers to his treatment of Billy Mills's poem. But the meaningful implications of the shifting gaps of the poet's repeating text actually came across even more effectively when read by the poet himself.

Derek Ball's Ar Foluain, settings in Irish of the presumably apocryphal MacDara Ó Luanaigh (Ball would have us believe he "publishes" his work by leaving it in bars abroad) undertook a more conventional approach to word-painting.

A number of works called on performers to speak as well as play and sing. This undertaking tends to be unwise, unless the performers have specific reading or acting skills. Ailís Ní Ríain's alternation of speaking and singing in End with Words of Hope(to texts by Sappho and the composer) was particularly gauche.

Ingrid Craigie's reading of John Ashbery's The System(with the discreetest musical background) was the strangest of the festival performances I heard: clear words painstakingly but obscurely qualifying the already obscure, in a way that was almost hypnotic.