NCH, Dublin. Music by Alyson Barber, Ciarán Quirke, Richard Gill, Christopher Fox, DE McCarthy, Gráinne Mulvey, David Bremner, Laura Kilty, Ian McDonnell, Dylan Curran, Peter Moran
This was a concert lit up by the performances of soprano Elizabeth Hilliard. And “soprano” does little justice to the extended techniques, speech-song and vocal range – from firm contralto to high coloratura – she was required to draw upon. Matched for energy and conviction in her partnership with composer-pianist David Bremner, the two gamely tackled a huge and wide-ranging programme of new and contemporary music.
Representing the Ensemble ICC (the Irish Composers’ Collective), the two immediately put their stamp on the concert with the opening item, Alyson Barber’s
Only in Sleep
. Sara Teasdale’s original poem depicts an adult dreaming of childhood friends, seeing them as children, and wondering whether they also dream of her and, if so, do they see her as a child. Barber’s simple treatment of this simple but intriguing conceit features a slow ostinato and a chilly nostalgia which Hilliard inhabited in a gripping, kind of somnambulant performance.
She later returned to this mind-state for Gráinne Mulvey’s
Eternity is now
, an unaccompanied setting of Anne le Marquand Hartigan. The couplet which book-ends the poem is intoned as though in slow motion, observing minutely the formation of each syllable, creating overtones and a stretching of time.
In between, an allusion to birds sets off lighter, quicker, more agile passages which Hilliard tossed off with apparent ease.
And so it was in word-settings by Richard Hill –
The Bridge
, after Kafka – Peter Moran –
The Stranger on the Southbound Trai
n – and Laura Kilty,
Black
. There were no texts provided for these, undermining their composers’ efforts to various degrees. The weird drama of
The Bridge
, as it contemplates the first time someone will cross it, still registered, and the text of
Black
was presented by Hilliard as a long, slow cantus firmus as decorated with lively electronic voice samplings.
David Bremner’s own
There must be something the matter with him
scarcely needed its text which is a poetic and amusing exploration by psychoanalyst RD Laing of the circular arguments engaged in by couples.
Bremner shone in pieces for piano only, including the boisterous
lliK. relliK
by Christopher Fox, inspired by a half-century of pop piano playing, and – out of the blue – a little oasis of gentle, almost impressionist melancholy in Ian McDonnell’s
For a memory
. The atonal splashes and wistful dissonances of Dylan Curran’s
Fragments I and II
were likable if not subtle.
