Exceptional ‘Composing the Island’ surveys last 100 years of music in Ireland

The largest survey of music by Irish composers ever held anywhere came to an end at the National Concert Hall on Sunday. The scale of Composing the Island – a collaboration between RTÉ and the National Concert Hall, with sponsorship from Bord na Móna, to survey the last 100 years of music in Ireland – was so exceptional that, taken alone, even the 13 concerts of the festival's last six days would probably qualify for the "largest ever" description, too, and certainly also as the largest ever survey of music by living Irish composers.

One of the ways of looking at the festival is as a cross-section of the concerns of the Irish composers alive and working today. Take the Crash Ensemble programme on Tuesday 20th. Ann Cleare's Dorchadas (Darkness) stems from her interest in exploring in sound "ideas and conditions that petrify me", a background that explains the work's claustrophobic, threatening sonorities.

Andrew Hamilton’s music for people who like art is constructed from chopped-up riffs that gradually expand and collide, while an acrobatic female vocalist (Michelle O’Rourke) delivers words by American painter Ad Reinhardt with a relentlessly high-level energy that intentionally makes her sound at times as if she’s going to choke in the effort.

Gerald Barry's string quartet First Sorrow, named after a story by Kafka, moves from an evocation of the chaste, vibrato-less world of viol consorts to a typically idiosyncratic setting of the words of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, sung and played simultaneously by the four string players.

Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás (Love and Death) "is inspired by the moments of ecstasy (both luscious and dark) within a number of sean nós songs but especially Aisling Gheal, and combines, often at high volume, the husky tones of Iarla Ó Lionáird with the amplified grit of the Crash Ensemble.

The range of interests and influences was as wide in other concerts. Deirdre Gribbin's Hearing Your Genes Evolve (played by the Vanbrugh String Quartet) attempts to translate aspects of DNA into the musical domain. Karen Power's deafening silence, given as part of an all-female programme played by Isabelle O'Connell, blends piano with field recordings of crickets. Linda Buckley's Fridur, from the same programme, was influenced by the landscapes the composer encountered during a stay at the Gullkistan Center for Creativity near Laugarvatn in Iceland, and her Fiol set out to treat a conventional string trio of violin, viola and cello (members of the Crash Ensemble) as a kind of super Hardanger fiddle.

Directly musical inspirations ranged from a Pavane by Luis Milán (in John Kinsella's Guitar Fantasy, played by John Feeley), through Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 (Seán Clancy's Neue Kraft Fühlend, played by the RTÉ Contempo Quartet, is intended as a "negative image" of the structure of the Beethoven), to the Alcott's movement of Charles Ives's Concord Sonata (in Jonathan Nangle's PAUSE, another Crash performance), and the music of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (in Greg Caffrey's Takemitsu's Dream, another guitar piece).

Further eastern influence, this time from a Japanese poetic form, was registered in Garrett Sholdice's gentle, spaced-out Tanka for Aki Takahashi (prelude #5), which presents a ghostly, suggestive outline of the slow movement from Schubert's late Piano Sonata in B flat (played by Crash pianist, Andrew Zolinsky).

The range of directly Irish influences is equally diverse. Ailís Ní Ríain's Beautiful Cracked Eyes for piano (Isabelle O'Connell) takes its name from a poem by Pat Ingoldsby; Siobhán Cleary's blackly angry Suantraí  (Lullabies), played with vehemence by Hugh Tinney, is dedicated "to the Magdalenes"; and Donnacha Dennehy's orchestral piece Crane (the RTÉ NSO under Gavin Maloney), inspired by the cranes that bedecked the skyline during Dublin's boom-time years, was originally part of an urban/industrial ballet project that never came to fruition.

Andrew Hamilton's specially-commissioned orchestral work C (his current work-naming strategy is to strive for neutrality, and he's working his way through the alphabet). C was played by the NSO under Maloney, and sounds like the opposite of deconstruction – literally so, as if a process of deconstruction were being run backwards, so that the end was what originally was the beginning. The suggested goal always appears to be a sequence of cadential chords, but in Hamilton's treatment the goal proves as elusive as a sneeze that just won't arrive. Like so much of this composer's work, on a first hearing it was both intriguing and infuriating, not least because of the ear-splittingly loud piccolo interruptions at the start.

For certainty of motion, and clarity of purpose, John Kinsella's Third Symphony (Joie de Vivre) is at the opposite end of the spectrum, mostly busy and buoyant. The style has won Kinsella a chapter in the new edition of Robert R Reilly's revisionist history of 20th- and 21st-century music, Surprised by Beauty (Ignatius Press).

Also orchestral, Stephen Gardner's NEVER…NEVER…NEVER, inspired by Francis Bacon and Ian Paisley, is a crude battering ram of a piece that is as dark as Kinsella's work is light. Both composers give the impression of never wavering in the courage of their convictions.

The festival finale returned to the 1920s for the well-conceived Yeats settings of Norman Hay's The Wind Among the Reeds, and Rhoda Coghill's Whitman-inspired Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. Hay's is the more impressive and cogent work, greatly aided in this performance by the sterling baritone Ben McAteer, and the fervent voices of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir under Mark Hindley.

Coghill showed both extraordinary ambition and achievement for someone aged 20 and composing during the Civil War. Though the flaws of construction in the work are many, she was clearly a composer in the making. And yet she would turn away from composition to earn a living from the piano. Were it not for Composing the Island, her largest work would still be awaiting a full hearing in public.