REVIEW

Shannon International

Music Festival

Limerick

MICHAEL DERVAN

As a student I remember being told by a professor in unequivocal terms that Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie was a work so costly to put on that it would never be heard live in Ireland. It had its Irish premiere within a couple of years, and has been heard twice since in Dublin and once in Belfast.

This year, marking the centenary of the composer’s birth, accounts for one of those performances, and a complete cycle of the organ music and performances of the great piano cycle, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus (both complete and partial).

Irish interest in Messiaen is still largely focused on works of the 1930s and 1940s rather than the later work. Gerhard Markson has programmed Chronochromie of 1960 with the RTÉ NSO and “Réveil des oiseaux” of 1953 is to come in October. But it would be a daring individual who today would prophesy a timescale for a complete survey of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux, from the mid-1950s, or a performance of Des Canyons aux Étoiles (an Alice Tully commission celebrating the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence, inspired by Utah’s natural beauty), or of Messiaen’s very late orchestral works.

Joanna MacGregor’s approach to 12 of the movements of the Vingt Regards in a late-night programme at St Mary’s Cathedral in Limerick interestingly evoked unexpected contexts for this landmark work, written in 1944 for Yvonne Loriod, who years later would become the composer’s wife.

MacGregor (below) allowed a sense of Lisztian bravura into the music, as well as evocations of the gestural language that informed so much serial writing of the 1950s and 1960s. She may not always be the tidiest or even the most accurate of Messiaen players. For instance, she regularised the rhythm of the Regard de la Vierge in ways the composer could hardly have approved of. But her playing was utterly persuasive in colouring, and she dared to take the Messiaen at his word when he asks for extreme slowness. She commanded both the raptness and the rapture that can make his contemplations so compelling in terms of intimacy and violence, mysticism and sensuality.

It was unfortunate for the piano improvisations Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin has collected under the title Elver Gleams to have been performed at lunchtime on the same day and in the same venue as the Messiaen. Ó Súilleabháin has carved out a niche for himself with a choppy, poppy style that integrates elements of traditional Irish music. But he now seems rather trapped by the harmonic blandness he has created, and by allowing his vamping to take the place of clear musical statement.

The performance of Schubert’s Octet by members of the Irish Chamber Orchestra (ICO), with guest wind players, was an enjoyable if lopsided affair. In spite of the momentary showing of dark clouds, the Octet is a work of irrepressible good humour. The lopsidedness in this case came from an imbalance within the ensemble, the ICO’s artistic director Anthony Marwood (leading from the first violin) and clarinettist Robert Plane showing a strength and depth of musical character which the other players simply didn’t match.

There were no such problems in a double Four Seasons bill, familiar from Gidon Kremer’s recording, which combines the ever-popular Vivaldi with the less well-known Las Cuatro Estaciones porteñas, by Argentinian tango king Astor Piazzolla. In terms of the ICO’s concert history of the Vivaldi, this performance could be called the musical version, not as in stage musical but in the sense of a direct focus on the music, without the histrionics of the ICO’s concerts with Nigel Kennedy.

The interleaving of the Vivaldi and Piazzolla provided a wealth of intriguing contrasts, which were clearly relished by the players on stage as well as by the audience, which listened throughout without venturing any applause, and then at the end rose to its feet in appreciation.