Project Arts Centre
The Ergodos Festival, curated by composers Garrett Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, has become a moveable feast. In its first incarnation, as the Printing House Festival of New Music, it was a weekend event.
Last year it moved from TCD’s Printing House to the Kevin Barry Room at the National Concert Hall and ran for eight days. This year was held in the Project Arts Centre and amounted to just two concerts.
The festival proclaimed itself to be “all about optimism”. “The industry of men and women – their ability to make something – is an essentially positive force,” proclaimed the publicity.
“Never before has there been both the necessity and opportunity to imagine again how something is done. The orchestra, that is a group of musicians working together, represents for us a microcosm of this potential. The soloist, too, is meaningful, simply for persevering alone.”
The opening concert on Friday saw the début of the Ergodos Orchestra. But if you found the curators’ idealistic statements a bit platitudinous, then what was presented as the Ergodos “Orchestra” might well have seemed like some kind of sick joke.
It amounted to five players (violin, viola, cello, clarinet and piano), which would in normal parlance make it an ensemble, specifically a quintet. In the event, only three of the evening’s eight pieces actually brought all five players together.
The programme, called Another Generation and performed, by request, without the interruption of applause, interspersed works by John Cage, Jonathan Nangle, Alexander Harker, Simon O'Connor and Garrett Sholdice, with arrangements of a Bach chorale, Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ).
The arrangements ranged from the fairly direct (for over- amplified string trio by Garrett Sholdice) to the selectively impressionistic (Simon O’Connor’s for full ensemble).
The intention may well have been to follow the pattern of Webern, whose celebrated orchestration of the six-part ricercar from the Musical Offering reveals as much about Webern as about Bach. But, sadly, Friday’s offerings revealed very little about Bach at all.
For a festival that was premised on optimism, the concert was an astonishingly downbeat one, the slow, dwell-in-the-moment style of Cage's Fivesetting the tone for the evening. If this was optimism, I'd hate to meet the Ergodos idea of anything much further down the scale.
Jonathan Nangle's My heart stopped a thousand beatsfor viola and cello and Simon O'Connor's Blue for solo violin, suffered from being presented in the shadow of Cage. Only Alexander Harker's Fluence for solo clarinet and electronics, with the solo instrument's almost old-fashioned rhapsodising buttressed by an electronic commentary, stepped entirely successfully outside of the evening's mood.
The most rewarding music within it came in the disembodied, lonely, floating evocations of a chorale in Garrett Sholdice's Chorales for James Tenney, for quintet.
