A fine first on many fronts

The Living Music Festival at Dublin's newest venue, The Helix, was a great success, writes Michael Dervan

RTÉ's new Living Music Festival was a first on many fronts. It was a major test of Ireland's newest performing arts centre, The Helix, with all three venues - the Mahony Hall, the Theatre, and The Space - called upon in a variety of ways.

It brought together RTÉ's professional performing groups as well as some major foreign participants to place a focus on one of the greatest composers of our time, Luciano Berio, a man whose work has long been noticeable by its absence from the programmes of RTÉ's two orchestras.

And, rather than have the venture controlled by someone dutifully treating the music of our time as a worthy but oh-so-difficult problem, RTÉ placed the artistic direction of the enterprise in the hands of a man who knows and cares about contemporary music: the composer Raymond Deane.

Deane is a writer as well as a composer, and Berio is a composer whose relationships with words and writers are central to his output, beginning with his Joyce-inspired pieces of the 1950s. Berio's interest in Joyce was prompted by Umberto Eco, with whom he worked on an ambitious radio programme on onomatopoeia in poetic language. The programme was never broadcast, and Berio created instead a self-standing tape piece, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), based on a reading of part of the Sirens chapter of Ulysses by Cathy Berberian, to whom he was then married. Berio's piece exploits words for their musical value, producing at times a babble out of which meaning tantalisingly flickers. This placing of the listener at the cusp of comprehension is an effect to be found in later pieces without the mediation of tape. Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), in fact, foreshadows much that was to follow in Berio's work, not only in terms of his treatment of words, but also in his teaming up with a leading writer as collaborator - he has also worked with Italo Calvino and Eduardo Sanguineti - and the world of shimmers and susurrations that feature in his later work.

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) featured in a late-night concert by the Crash Ensemble where, for all the primitiveness it shares with other early products of the electronic studio, it stood out as a highlight.

Other Berberian-inspired works fared less well. The landmark Sequenza III, a remarkable scena for Berberian's dramatic talent in volatile character shifting, was flatly done by Crash's Natasha Lohan, and neither Chamber Music nor the Folk Songs, one of the composer's most popular works, made much impact in performances by VOX21.

All these pieces were performed in the Helix's Theatre, a venue bedevilled by noisy door-openings (an unfortunate feature of all performing spaces at The Helix), chilly draughts and poor sound. As currently presented, with a stage draped as for a theatre performance, it sounds like a venue where only amplified music, or something as intense as Xenakis's Rebonds for solo percussion (offered by the visiting Belgian ensemble, Ictus) can hope to communicate with any real immediacy.

The big Berio offerings were given in the Mahony Hall, where the sound was quite simply splendid, whether the forces involved were small or large. The first Berio piece to be heard there was Requies, which was inspired by Berberian's death in 1983, and was played by the RTÉCO under Friedrich Goldmann. The composer has written of this piece that it "describes a melody, but only in the sense that a shadow describes an object or an echo describes a sound". The RTÉCO's performance had a somewhat tentative quality, making the work almost an echo of an echo, imperfectly sinuous, flawed in a connectivity that's already at times intentionally tenuous, but quietly touching all the same, and almost frightening in its single outburst.

The National Symphony Orchestra under Zsolt Nagy offered early and late Berio, the Auden-inspired Nones of 1954 - his first orchestral work, a set of variations in the highly fragmented serial style of the time - and SOLO for trombone and orchestra of 1999 - a virtuoso concerto of mesmerising brilliance from soloist Christian Lindberg, with a rich orchestral resourcefulness to match, all finely marshalled by the conductor.

The performance of Laborintus II (1965) by London Sinfonietta Voices and the London Sinfonietta under Pierre-André Valade, was in many ways the highlight of the weekend. This Dante-inspired piece, a collaboration with Sanguineti for speaker, three vibrato-less female singers (sopranos Claire Booth and Sarah Eyden, and mezzo soprano Heather Cairncross), eight actors, tape and ensemble, has an almost Babel-like profusion of words and sounds - Berio has likened the work to, among other things, a tracking shot and a musical catalogue. In this performance, with Terry Edwards the sonorous narrator (the one voice always calculated to communicate clearly), the piece came across as a form of theatre for the ear - one could readily see why the composer, who allows the piece to be staged, prefers it as a concert experience.

There is, in Berio's larger pieces, a degree of refinement, a density of intellectualisation and an elaboration of workmanship, which can cause a degree of emotional distancing for the listener. A number of works by other major figures communicated with a different sort of immediacy - Harrison Birtwistle's Nenia, the Death of Orpheus (Claire Booth, the rivettingly clear-voiced soloist with the London Sinfonietta), and two pieces from the NSO's programme, Lutoslawski's Livre pour Orchestre (a sort of probing finger-painting to Berio's filigree), and Edgard Varèse's Hyperprism, this latter still carrying a remarkable shock value for a work now nearly 80 years old.

Deane charted an interesting thread by including Frederick May's String Quartet of 1936, the piece which brought modernism to music in Ireland, and Seóirse Bodley's Configurations of 1967, a piece which attempted to keep Ireland abreast of the musical avant-garde, when that description was still a fashionable one. Of the three new Irish works commissioned for the festival, Andrew Hamilton's MAP for orchestra was the most interesting, a giddily disjointed journey using the most basic of musical material.

With a range of seminars and talks by Berio expert, David Osmond-Smith, and a live telephone interview with the composer (forbidden to travel to Dublin for medical reasons), the festival offered stimulation that extended well beyond the works that were played. The Space, as the Helix's small, black-box theatre is called, accommodated these events with intimate ease. The Mahony Hall was intimate too, despite its spaciousness, and was hailed a success by everyone I spoke to. So also, was the festival itself. In short, the only question remaining is, when is the next one going to be?

• The Helix, DCU, Collins Avenue, Glasnevin, Dublin 9. Box office: 01-7007000. Website: www.thehelix.ie