THE composer Brian Boydell was 80 on St Patrick's Day. The milestone was commemorated in music, courtesy of RTE and the National Concert Hall, at the John Field Room last night, with a programme of chamber, instrumental, vocal and choral works by the composer and a handful of brief musical tributes from composer colleagues, most of whom, at one stage or another, were students of his.
In an introductory note, the composer himself pointed out that whereas in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s he was considered to be very modern, he might now "possibly be considered rather old-fashioned". Well, yes ... but in many ways the music might be closer to fashions of today than it was to the headier Darmstadt-led trends of the 1950s that the composer has in mind.
The Boydell represented through this celebration was a romantic rhapsodist, inclined at his most serious towards the reflectively elegiac, at his lightest towards modest gestures of technical exploration. Odd as it may seem, the Pack of Fancies for a Travelling Harper of 1970 can now be heard to embody something of the mood of minimalism if not the actual mechanism, an association evoked elsewhere through a fondness for ostinatos and dreamy repetition.
After the RTE Vanbrugh' Quartet's incisive opening performance of a work from the 1920s, Janacek's First Quartet, Boydell's Second, from the late 1950s, sounded soft and loose; it's not only by the standards of his own time that the composer's principle of "creating sounds that I like personally" can be felt to be backward-looking.
Paradoxically it was in the Three Madrigals, Op. 60, of 1967, where the archaism is both deliberate and most clearly manifest that the strongest sense of musical engagement was engendered. Cantique's performance here, under Blanaid Murphy, was clear and poignant (happily free of the fruity vibrato I have heard in performances of Boydell's choral music in the past), and it was hardly surprising that at the end of the evening the composer should have singled out this performance for especial praise.
It is to be hoped that such comparatively well-resourced national organisations as RTE band the NCH will find room later during the 80th birthday year to programme some of the composer's larger but now largely neglected compositions.
The specially written musical tributes - from Joseph Groocock, Kevin O'Connell, Martin O'Leary, Fergus Johnston and Eric Sweeney - were overwhelmingly tongue-in-cheek, and heavily reliant on Happy Birthday to You as a fallback point of reference. Eric Sweeney's punchy toccata (called, apparently, Brian Boy Dell) was the brightest and best of them. Like the rest it was played with point and aplomb by pianist Anthony Byrne.
