Ensemble Antipodes

Lumieres - Jean-Luc Darbellay

absencesfragmenteliWalter Feldman FAL - Rico Gubler

A Space between Words - Deirdre Gribbin

Anaktoria - Iannis Xenakis

The Ensemble Antipodes, based in Berne, Switzerland, was founded in 1995 with a lineup of players based on the scoring of Schubert's Octet. For its first Irish concerts, presented by the Association of Irish Composers, the group presented two programmes of mostly Irish and Swiss music, the second of which was given at County Hall, Dun Laoghaire on Tuesday.

The composer Jean-Luc Darbellay (born 1946) was present to conduct his Lumieres, written in 1998 for the full Antipodes octet. His introduction drew an analogy with a train journey, interspersing the bright light of open countryside with dark passages in tunnels. The piece itself makes effective use of strongly-conceived gestures - bass clarinet emerging from the opening flurries of low pizzicato, being a fine example. However, the moments individually made a stronger impression than the accumulation of the whole.

The string quartet, absences- fragmente by Walter Feldmann (born 1965), was conceived in the early 1990s. Its sometimes ethereal, sometimes crunching sound world has lines that slide, skitter and rasp with a vibrato-less finish that emulates the effect of overblowing on the composer's own instrument, the flute.

FAL (1999) by Rico Gubler (born 1972) creates a spaced-out mood with a texturally rich web, almost sounding like a chamber ensemble evocation of the cloudy masses of the orchestral works Ligeti was writing in the early 1960s.

The Irish contribution on Tuesday was Deirdre Gribbin's 10-year-old A Space between Words for solo violin, played by Antipodes member, Egidius Steiff, for whom it was written. With slowly-stretched, often microtonally-inflected, upwardly reaching lines, later filled with bursts of activity, it sounded as if it were conceived to be ushered into the spiritual stillness of a great cathedral.

The concert's major work came from the great Iannis Xenakis, who once described silence as "a state before explosion". Anaktoria, written for the Octuor de Paris in 1969, has his trademark in-your-face quality. It's one of the great paradoxes of Xenakis's work that something so highly controlled and finely calculated should sound so raw and unmediated. In this concert, it also suggested an intensity of internal renewal that was not to be found in the other works. Ensemble Antipodes did it proud.