Reviews

Reviewed: Sonorities Festival, Protestants Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and Commissions from Cork

Sonorities Festival at Queen's University and BBC Music Live Belfast

At first sight the new Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University is just another electronic studio, square and rather functional, with plastic seats and exposed metal scaffolding.

But the colour scheme, pastel-coloured panels within an overall purplish tonality, is restful, and lighting is used effectively, Pedro Carneiro's marimba concert on Monday for instance being bathed in a reddish glow.

But the interest is naturally in the electronic sound diffusion, which is vivid, distortion-free, and comes from all directions (the floor, rather disconcertingly, turns out to be a grille, with another room underneath, so that the sound can come from below, as well as from above and from every side).

There's only so much you can do with one marimba on its own, but with electronic interaction the possibilities are, quite simply, boundless. In Barry Truax's Nightwatch the electronic effects were all derived from the marimba, albeit much altered.

In Ricardo Climent's A gravidade liberta the beaters themselves apparently interacted electronically as they moved through space, without even having to touch the instrument, their movement converted by the sound diffuser seated at the console (in this case, Riccardo Climent himself) into liquid sprays of notes.

The Electronic Hammer, three percussionists from South and Central America, originally came together to perform Curt Lippe's Music for Hi-hat and Computer, the "hi-hat" in question being cymbals, excited rather than played with iron chains and violin bows.

There was more variety here, the instruments including drums, rows of suspended gongs, bongos and maracas, and the styles ranging from the Latin American idioms of Javier Alvarez's Temazcal to the cardiac palpitations, reproduced on the Indian tabla, of Ricardo Giraldo's De'go.

It was obvious, from the comments afterwards, that the mainly young audience was excited by the new worlds of possibilities these works have opened up.

The skill shown by the performers shouldn't be underestimated, however.

In the meantime the BBC's Music Live festival continues. It's just unfortunate that there should be an overlap with Sonorities, resulting, on Tuesday in two simultaneous concerts featuring the music of Deirdre Gribbin.

The BBC event was given by the Irish Chamber Orchestra's concert conducted by Stephen Cleobury in St Anne's Cathedral.

No lack of space or ambience here, but the acoustics, while lending body to the sound, blurred much of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro. Deirdre Gribbin's Mare Tran . . . Crossing the Sea features jagged vocal declamation (the excellent Alison Wells) over cloudy string textures.

The fifth movement, On a Rainy Night to a Friend in the North, and the final A Night Mooring on the River achieved a brooding Celtic quality, if that's the right word to use of settings of Chinese texts.

I also enjoyed the Sibelius-like textures of John Kinsella's Hommage à Clarence, the Clarence in question being the violinist Clarence Myerscough.

The BBC Singers brought unusually focused singing and a large dynamic range to Fauré's Requiem, with fine solos from soprano Margaret Feaviour and baritone Stephen Charlesworth, both of whom are also members of the BBC Singers. - Dermot Gault

Protestants Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

As the political process in the North stammers and stutters and shows signs of running out of steam, Robert Welch's new play emerges to fill the breech and get the conversation up and running again.

Within Gary McCann's polished wood set, in the style of an Elizabethan round, Paul Hickey gives a fluid, ever-changing solo performance, deftly switching personae, accents, body language and character.

Welch has crafted not a conventional narrative but a series of snapshots of individuals at crisis points in their protest-centred faith, their plainly spoken testimonies bridged by a swirl of lyrical poetry and word pictures.

Director Rachel O'Riordan responds with some equally eye-catching visual images to match Hickey's characterisations, in turn sweet, pathetic, ugly, violent and threatening.

From Elizabeth I, the first protestant queen of England, to the mad dogs of Glasgow's Ibrox Park and Belfast's Sandy Row; from the strict but humane philosophy of Martin Luther to the heartless, cruelty of Cromwell and his slavish followers.

Taking the far-flung perspectives of fundamentalism in Mississippi, religious and political conflict in Wexford and family traditions of Orangeism in Armagh, Welch argues that the road invariably chosen by Protestants is the hard road, the one fraught with doubt and insecurity.

While successive characters express sympathy for their gullible Catholic neighbours, led up the garden path by the fairytales and chicanery of their priests, they hint at a thinly disguised envy of the perceived certainty of spiritual life on the other side of the fence. Protestants is not an end in itself. It is a provocative, mischievous springboard to wider discussion and debate, comparison and analysis. It is both an academic work and an invitation to all to join in the conversation.

Like the piece itself, one senses that Hickey is at the start of an exciting journey, where speech rhythms and wry black humour will soon begin to find their way out of the seriousness of the wide-ranging themes and content.

At the Old Museum until May 8th, then touring to Edinburgh, Coleraine, Downpatrick, Derry and Lisburn. The Old Museum has organised a programme of complementary events. - Jane Coyle

Tel: Belfast 9023 3332 for information.

Commissions from Cork Cork International Choral Festival

The Cork International Choral Festival has been an important commissioner of new choral music for more than four decades via its Seminar on Contemporary Choral Music.

For this year's 50th festival, director John Fitzpatrick chose not to add to the tally of 119 commissions by 99 composers, and not to have an actual seminar. Instead, he opted to celebrate the event by performing a cross-section of the impressive body of commissioned work.

The choice of programme was left to Celso Antunes, artistic director of the National Chamber Choir (NCC).

The NCC has been an enlivening presence at recent seminars, with both singers and conductor participating in the wide-ranging debates that surround the workshopping of the commissioned pieces.

Antunes usually needs no encouragement to speak - he offers a personal introduction to virtually every work he performs with the NCC - and the seminars have always been generous with the documentation they provide.

But at St Fin Barre's Cathedral Antunes spoke very little, mostly to indicate when a particular piece was in more than a single movement.

And, although five languages were involved, neither texts nor translations were provided for the chosen works by Darius Milhaud (Traversée from the 1962 seminar), Harald Genzmer (Irische Harfe, 1966), William Walton (Cantico del Sole, 1974), Aloys Fleischmann (Poet in the Suburbs, 1974), Rodion Shchedrin (Concertino, 1982), Raymond Deane (. . . e mi sovvien l'eterno . . ., 1988), Petr Eben (Rhythmus de gaudiis Paradisi, 1996), Ian Wilson (bluebrighteyes, 2000) and Mícheál Ó Suilleabháin (Maranatha, 2000).

Given the track record of choir and conductor, the singing of some of the pieces seemed expressively rather muted. Fleischmann's Poet in the Suburbs lifted the first half onto a new plane of freshness and animation, though not much of Thomas Kinsella's text was actually decipherable.

No deciphering was needed in Shchedrin's Concertino, a textless piece where movement titles like "Staircase downwards" and "Russian Chimes" make the compositional strategy perfectly clear.

In the second half Deane's . . . e mi sovvien l'eterno . . . stood out for being as varied in its ways of speaking the text as in singing it, and the choir relished the opportunities for full-blooded singing in both Eben's Rhythmus de gaudiis Paradisi and Ó Suilleabháin's Maranatha. - Michael Dervan