Kilkenny Arts Festival concerts

Various venues, Kilkenny

The major musical event of the opening weekend of Kilkenny Arts Festival was Saturday’s concert of sacred music by two English composers, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

Tallis (circa 1505-85) is said to have been the teacher of Byrd (circa 1540-1623), and the two men became close friends and colleagues. Their shared sympathies and collaborations extended beyond the writing of music.

They were both Catholics at a time of religious upheavals. And in 1575, when Queen Elizabeth I granted them a patent for the printing of music and lined music paper, they promptly published a joint set of Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur(usually known as Cantiones sacrae) which they dedicated to her.

The Kilkenny concert was given by the English choir The Cardinall’s Musick, whose conductor, Andrew Carwood, offered succinct and suggestive spoken introductions to the music. The first half of the evening was devoted to Tallis, the second to Byrd.

And from the start of Tallis's splendidly celebratory Loquebantur variis linguisit was clear that this was to be an evening of compellingly-projected, full-toned, gorgeously resonant singing. It was the kind of evening which had one pinching oneself to check that such edifices of sound could be produced by such a small number of voices – the choir numbers 12, but its members also sang in smaller groupings.

Each half was carefully constructed with an eye to contrast, and the choir split for a number of the items, so that the sound of Gregorian chant could be heard from afar, effectively from around the corner for most listeners in the atmospheric setting of Kilkenny’s L-shaped Black Abbey.

Byrd is audibly the more modern-sounding of the two composers, with a rhythmic movement and a cadential thrust that place a clear stylistic distance between himself and his older colleague. But it was actually the works by Tallis which made the greater impression, in spite of the fact that Carwood and his singers showed that well-known English predilection for underplaying the sometimes extraordinary dissonant clashes that are such a feature of Tallis’s work.

Sunday morning brought the festival to the intimacy of Kilkenny Castle’s Parade Tower for a programme of French lute music, played on the theorbo (a member of the lute family with extra, low strings) by the young French lutenist, Thomas Dunford.

Three suites by Robert de Visée and arrangements by him of two movements by Marin Marais served as a reminder of what a rich repertoire is represented by the lute, fully comparable in quality to the much better-known repertoire for harpsichord.

The kitschy decor of the Set Theatre was the setting for a performance of William Walton's ground-breaking Façadeof 1922, settings for reciter (Barry McGovern) and ensemble (Ensemble Nouveau under David Brophy) of poems by Edith Sitwell, which are patterns of sound in which strange shards of meaning can be fleetingly spied. McGovern delivered the text with tongue-twisterish metricality, and the playing stiffly eschewed full indulgence of the stylistic gymnastics which make the work a delight.