Finding a Voice festival: An Irish celebration of a multitude of women composers

The first of the two-dozen-plus composers featured in the final weekend of Clonmel’s all-woman Finding a Voice festival whose music I got to know was Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729). I may not even have been out of my teens. And, yes, I heard her harpsichord music, in a 1950s recording by Thurston Dart, before I ever came across a note by the likes of Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann.

Sitting in Old St Mary’s Church during the final three days of the festival’s five-day run, I realised that the representation of music by women that I was being treated to in Co Tipperary might have taken a decade or more to hear at concerts in the Dublin I grew up in. Outside of Dublin Festival of Twentieth Century Music, which ran from 1969 to 1986, one or two works a year by women was probably the norm in the city. And in my early years of serious concertgoing the only orchestral work to break a ceiling that was more brass than glass was Penillon, by the Welsh composer Grace Williams.

Unfortunately this year’s Clonmel programmes were dogged by inappropriate amplification, excessive volume and, separately, its use when it simply was not necessary, with attendant timbral distortion of voices and instruments.

The issue surfaced early in Gráinne Mulvey’s Entry and Exit Wound, for flute (Joe O’Farrell) and electronics (the composer), with the inimitable Barry McGovern’s recorded voice intoning words by Edward Denniston at a volume and with a degree of sibilance that felt like an assault.

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With the composer herself involved in the performance that may well have been the intention, of course. Her specially commissioned …Until the Women Are Free (Aylish Kerrigan, mezzo-soprano; O’Farrell, flute; Adrian Mantu, cello; David Bremner, piano; and the composer, electronics) is a work of protest and defiance. The frequent burying of texts spoken and sung behind walls of sound may well be a direct reference to the difficulty that the pioneering women whose words were being quoted had faced in making themselves heard in the first place. Mulvey has created a striking, stirring piece, obsessive and blunt but impactful.

Rhona Clarke’s Smiling Like That…, setting the words of Molly Bloom, from James Joyce’s Ulysses, for voice (the staunch Kerrigan) and tape, sparked the composer into an atypical engagement with machine-like drumming and a more characteristic creation of choral textures. Seventeen-year-old Patsy Culleton’s ballad-like Cables for solo piano (Bremner) is a piece with a guaranteed future. It won the Royal Irish Academy of Music’s composition competition and will be published in the academy’s grade-IV piano book next year.

Siobhán Cleary’s note on her new Scheherazade (The Art of the Trickster) says it was commissioned by the viola-player Nathan Sherman and the percussionist Alex Petcu as part of a project asking composers to write works reflecting “on archetypes and the collective unconscious”.

The most celebrated musical Scheherazade is the alluring, evocative and colourful orchestral suite that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed in 1888. Cleary seems to have been drawn into that work’s magic net to the point where she has created something like a musical shrine built out of Rimskyian gestures, a space that, once entered, cannot be left, so powerful is the magnetism of the flying melodic lines.

In the same programme Áine Mallon’s Arboreal used imitative dialogue to suggest parental messages between trees, and Jacqueline Fletcher’s song of the weeping ice (winner of the 2023 competition run by Finding a Voice and the Contemporary Music Centre) combined viola and percussion with electronics to emulate the threatening, rasping sounds of masses of ice melting. The visceral and sensual, brash and delicate dialogue, by the Berlin-based English composer Rebecca Saunders, has a kind of exploratory trajectory that made it the concert’s standout work.

I’ve been focusing on works by living composers. But Finding a Voice this year actually gave a platform to more dead composers than to living ones. The violinist Claire Duff and the harpsichordist Rachel Factor seemed less at home in a 1771 sonata by Anna Amalia (an arrangement of a flute sonata) than they did in earlier repertoire, especially their opening sonata, from 1693, by Isabella Leonarda, and their closing one, by Jacquet de la Guerre, from the first decade of the following century. Duff has a winning way with improvisatory impetuosity and filigree decoration in this kind of repertoire. Although Factor did not always seem quite as home as Duff, the playing of these two sonatas came across with persuasive flourish.

The solo piano recital by the London-based Spaniard Antonio Oyarzabal was consistently stylish and sensitive. It was marred by inadequate programme information – the selection of works was expanded beyond what was advertised, and the details were explained only afterwards. The highlights were clear: the four modernist April Preludes by Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915-1940), who was born in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1915 and died of miliary tuberculosis in France at the age of 25. She conducted her own Piano Concerto as a graduation work at the age of 20, and her Military Symphony with the BBC Symphony Orchestra three years later. Oyarzabal played her April Preludes with thrilling virtuosity and bite, and followed with a gently glowing arrangement of Ina Boyle’s Sleep Song of 1923.

The festival ended with the late Claudia Montero’s rhythmically angular but soft-cored (and ridiculously over-amplified) Luces y Sombras for guitar (the impressive Eleanor Kelly) and string quartet (the ConTempo). The ConTempo Quartet also offered hard-edged readings of highly contrasted works by Henriette Bosmans (her exploratory 1927 String Quartet), Dobrinka Tabakova (whose 2004 On a Bench in the Shade, which emulates the ebb and flow of summer conversations) and Linda Buckley (her Beethoven Reflected is an absorbing, mainly still-sounding engagement with Beethoven’s late String Quartet in C sharp minor in which material gets absorbed and reabsorbed).