Cantique/Blanaid Murphy

{TABLE} Crecht Mhor ........ Stephen Gardener {/TABLE} CREACHT Mhor (Great Wound), or Creacht Mor as it is spelt in the programme, is an oratorio about the Great Famine for unaccompanied choir, with small parts for uillean pipes and for narrator.

Bill Hughes, the author of the words, read the narration and Stephen Gardener, composer of the music, was in the audience.

When I entered St Mary's, Howth, on Saturday night, I was slightly taken aback to see the uillean pipes and an electronic keyboard. Was this to be a folksy stimulation of stock responses to the Celtic thing?

As it happened, the pipes were confined to some interludes between choral sections, except for one short unison passage with the choir, not a happy inspiration, and the keyboard was only used as an occasional life line in the treacherous seas of intonation, thrown by the conductor, Blanaid Murphy.

The traditional melodic turns of the solo pipes and the narration with its description of the trials of the Irish and its tributes to the help given by the Quakers and the Choctaw Indians could hardly help arousing stock responses; but the music was of a different kind.

Long drawn out chords overlapped and blended with other chords, all spiced with dissonances, and from the shifting harmonies melodic lines of a more conventional nature than one might have expected arose.

It was quite exciting at first but the uniformly slow pace of the work and the family resemblance of the harmonies led in the end to a dangerous blandness.

The more exquisitely Cantique sang the more concordant became the dissonance and the final evocation of Irish children looking toward the dawn seemed a less than worthy conclusion to more than an hour of music.