{TABLE} Trane ...................... Steven Gardner Bread ...................... Nikola Le Fanu Fratres .................... Arvo Part What shall I sing? ......... David Lumsdaine {/TABLE} CONCORDE had planned to give the first performance of the sextet that had been commissioned from Nicola Le Fanu at the midday recital in the Lane Gallery last Sunday, but could not, owing to the illness of one of its members. Instead we heard her setting of Brendan Kennelly's Bread, for soprano and piano, and Steven Gardner's Trane, for violin, cello, clarinet and piano.
Trane, named after the saxophonist John Coltrane, might well have been called Train for it would have made splendid background music for a silent film about the romance of steam. The chugging motoric rhythms of wheels and pistons, the hooting of sirens and the hiss of escaping steam, all found their musical equivalents in the jazz inspired idiom. The piece sounded much better than it did a few weeks ago in the John Field Room of the NCR.
La Fanu's dramatic setting of Bread has a very ornate vocal line and the composer read the beginning and end of the poem. This was not enough for satisfactory comprehension for Concorde's singer, Tina Verbeke, favours sound at the expense of textual sense, and the meaning of the words, which seemed to dictate the musical structure, remained enigmatic.
Part's Fratres and Lumsdaine's What shall I sing? were on the original programme Fratres, a theme and variations for violin and piano, is quite a busy piece, but nothing much seems to happen. The equation of movement and stasis is an aim of this music and the Latin title ("brothers") suggests a religious significance.
Lumsdaine's What shall I sing? is a setting of short texts, mostly anonymous, mostly nursery rhymes, for soprano and two clarinets. The instruments wove a pleasant and unexacting filigree of sound and the soprano was like a third instrument.
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