Reviews

Reviewed: Ian Pace (piano), Robyn Hitchcock & Venus 3and Dunmall, RTÉ NSO/Pearse

Ian Pace (piano)

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

Raymond Deane - Rahu's Rounds. Siris. Michael Finnissy - English Country-Tunes

Take the abstraction of Beethoven's Hammerklavier fugue and the virtuosity of Liszt in thundering mode, and transform them via the gyrations of the post-war avant-garde, and you might have some idea of what Michael Finnissy's innocently-titled English Country-Tunes actually sound like.

Finnissy, an English composer who turned 60 last year, wrote this landmark, eight-movement work in 1977. Thirty years on it still often creates a mesmeric effect, almost of virtuoso caricature. Think of a piano pummelled by some kind of fiendish piano-playing robot with the control lever set to "hyper". The piece is a switchback ride of extremes. It sets out its stall of stark contrasts early on, it keeps to it, and then it outdoes itself.

It was interesting to hear Ian Pace's breathtaking performance, presented by Music21 (formerly Mostly Modern) at the NCH John Field Room, in the wake of two pieces by Irish composer Raymond Deane. Deane, like Finnissy, is himself a pianist of considerable facility, although nowadays he mostly leaves the performance of his piano music to players with even greater technical gifts.

In a pre-performance conversation between composer and performer, Deane talked about his own fondness for discontinuities, the way he likes to set up processes and disrupt them, and his interest in annihilating his material. He shares aspects of the aggression of the kind of writing that Finnissy favours, and writes in a way where contrasts of different masses, densities and activity levels function in a way contrasts of colour normally do. Yet there was also something more private and introverted about his two pieces than about Finnissy's decidedly unpretty, almost apocalyptic vision of Englishness.

Rahu's Rounds takes its title from a demon of Hindu mythology. Siris, a piece specially written for Ian Pace and here receiving its premiere, is named after a work by Bishop Berkeley, a 1744 book which is "a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Enquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water".

Siris is the more substantial and interesting of the two. The busier writing works through a kind of textured greyness, but some of the quieter passages offered the evening's strongest suggestions of familiar lyrical impulse, presented in a context where such writing sounded strange rather than familiar. - Michael Dervan

Robyn Hitchcock & Venus 3

Whelans, Dublin

"Hey, this is where it's at!" announces bass player Scott McCaughey, quoting from a long-ago gig by some almost-forgotten rockers. This, indeed, is where it's at in Dublin on a Tuesday night in January, and Whelans is packed for the return of Robyn Hitchcock, who is here with his new band, Venus 3.

"We're from west London," claims Hitchcock, and the crowd laughs - they know damn well that the guitarist, REM's Peter Buck, is from Athens, Georgia, and that the other two guys, McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin also play in REM, so chances are they're from across the pond, too.

It's worth the admission fee, though, just to see Hitchcock - in fact, it's worth it just to hear his offbeat, acid-tongued between-song banter - but the presence of the REM jangler is definitely a bonus. Buck was a fan of Hitchcock's old band the Soft Boys, so there's a psychedelic mutual appreciation society going on here - and the uniform seems to be brightly coloured shirts with paisley and floral designs.

The band launches into Adventure Rocket Ships, Hitchcock's voice orbiting somewhere between Bowie, Syd Barrett and Roy Harper. Other songs from the band's new album, Ole! Tarantula, nicely blend Buck's chiming guitar and Hitchcock's vocal sneer. NY Doll is a eulogy to the Dolls' late bassist Arthur Kane, and the album's title track is, apparently, about where babies come from. As usual, Hitchcock's whip-crack lyrical wit is present and politically incorrect.

Given Hitchcock's sprawling back catalogue, which takes in The Soft Boys, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians and his solo work, we can probably expect him to pull out a few nuggets, and he duly obliges with Sally Was a Legend, Arms of Love, Madonna of the Wasps and the wonderfully tactile Vibrating. There are, alas, no REM songs, but Hitchcock and Buck nod to their shared influences with a reading of the late Syd Barrett's See Emily Play and a wildly reckless rendition of the Byrds' Eight Miles High. Where it's at? You said it. - Kevin Courtney

Dunmall, RTÉ NSO/Pearse

NCH, Dublin

Horizons, RTÉ's annual lunchtime series of orchestral programmes selected by Irish composers, returned this week. Calling the tunes for the first concert was Ed Bennett, who was born in 1975 in Bangor, Co Down, and now teaches composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire.

Bennett picked two substantial 15-minute works of his own: all of this used to be trees (which was commissioned by the BBC for the 2005 Sonorities festival, and borrows its title from an inner-city graffito) and Ausland (which won first prize at the 2006 Tactus international young composers' forum at Brussels).

Both scores develop a counterpoint of clusters into crowded tuttis where strings and woodwinds compete for attention against a growing presence of sustained percussion and staccato brass. In all of this used to be trees, these distractions are enhanced by an additional and disjointed layer of live electronics.

In contrast to the studious atonality of Bennett's own pieces, the two others he chose - by his Birmingham colleague Joe Cutler and former teacher Brian Irvine - draw on assimilable harmonic resources.

Cutler's ULF (2006, so named because it reminds him of Swedish table-tennis champ Ulf Carlsson) proceeds from a frenzied opening to a serene chorale, with orchestration that keenly exploits distinctions of timbre between instrumental families.

There's limpid instrumentation, too, in Irvine's Dream of Dark and Troubled Things, which, despite its title, is a luminescent and mostly tranquil tableau. As a fixed context for some completely unscripted improvisation by saxophonist Paul Dunmall - a "mystery tour", in the words of conductor Colman Pearse - it has been cunningly devised.

Dunmall served up an exhilarating obbligato that ranged from muezzin-like melodising to spiralling passage-work of an ultra-jazzy hue.

It was a more than ample endorsement of a composer's faith in the unplanned musical event. - Andrew Johnstone