Kevin Barry Room, NCH, Dublin
Soprano Sue Rynhart and viola player Abigail Smith teamed up for this programme of six short contrasting works by members of the Irish Composers’ Collective.
Two duos succeeded in defining clear emotional content. In Dennis Wyers's scat-influenced Shades of Meaning, an intently jejune central section was framed by buoyant rhythmic patterning, while Patrick Connolly's There's a Certain Slant of Lightadmitted few distractions from the impression of a folksy lament.
Hugh Martin Boyle's duo setting of WB Yeats's The Moodsgenerated appropriate feelings of decay and disintegration through half-formed viola tones and drawn-out yet disjointed vocal phrasing. Yet the seven-line poem didn't withstand a delivery taking nearly as many minutes.
Rynhart showed her best in David Bremner's We Hesitate, a fittingly abstract monody for the surrealist words of John Ashbery. In terms of composition and execution, this two-minute item felt the most technically assured of the evening.
Donal MacErlaine's Illo Cuper Locu, for voice and tape, and Dylan Rynhart's half-composed, half-improvised Organ Donation, for solo viola, staked claims to concepts from the respective worlds of semiotics and medicine. Neither piece, however, seemed bent on justifying its subject matter in plainly audible terms.
The event as a whole mixed moments of delicate expression with others of slight unsteadiness, while the total performing time of barely half an hour proved disappointingly short. There was also a risk that the background recordings of modern jazz, played as the audience gathered and during the interval, might have captivated some ears more than the concert did itself.
