Michael Dungan listens to Crash Ensemble at Trinity College, Andrew Johnstone attended the Pipeworks Festival in Dublin and Michael Dervan was at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Cork.
Crash Ensemble
Trinity College Dublin
There was a minimalist flavour to much of the Crash Ensemble's programme on Friday night.
The piano solo, Incarnation II, by Japan's Somei Satoh, is intended to induce a meditative state via its blend of Buddhist chant, repetition and overtones, the latter produced with remarkable clarity by pianist David Adams.
Overall, however, the rewards for a non-meditating listener were in inverse proportion to the demands on the player.
Director Donnacha Dennehy's Streetwalker takes a welter of diverse ideas - "harmonic collapses", "interlocking terraced steps", images of "cars crashing in the Chrysler building", anti- establishment sentiment - and melts them all down into a driving, urban sequence of repetitions in which the original ingredients are impossible to discern.
Naryana's Cows by American Tom Johnson is minimalist programme music in which a narrator reads out a mathematical puzzle about cows and calves. Johnson appears to assign one note per cow, so that the music grows from an initial, single note for the original cow to a full four minutes' worth of notes after 17 years of producing calves.
It's amusing and clever, an irreverent kind of minimalism in which it would be lovely to think Johnson was poking fun at colleagues like Philip Glass.
I'm still waiting for the Glass piece that stops me from thinking of him as a one-trick-pony.
His 1969 Music in Similar Motion is not that piece. Not even the nicely-spread arrangement for keyboards, strings, winds and electric bass by Crash's John Godfrey can make good on Glass's hopelessly inaccurate assertion that what characterises Similar Motion "is its sense of drama".
There is no drama, only stasis and endless repetition.
At best, it provided a neutral sound-backdrop for Simon Doyle's amazing "video accompaniment", 8,400 images of circular objects flicking by hypnotically at eight frames per second.
The programme's non-minimalist music included Roger Doyle's electroacoustic Passades No 6, a nine-minute tape with a rumbling, elemental bottom register that provided a deep bedrock for the eerie, sometimes almost human electronically-generated sounds layered upon it.
The evening's best combination of piece and performance was Kate Ellis playing Helmutt Lachenmann's seven-minute Pression for solo cello.
It explores the non-conventional sound possibilities of the instrument, such as rubbing, grating, and snapping the strings, and striking different parts of its body. Ellis somehow shaped all this into something poetic as well as provocative.
Pipeworks Festival
Various venues, Dublin
It's 25 years since the first Dublin International Organ Festival. Under a catchy new name, the 12th one has maintained high standards of artistic imaginativeness.
This year's jamboree brought several world-class artists to Ireland for the first time, among them veteran Italian organist Luigi Tagliavini.
In music by his Baroque compatriots Corelli, Pasquini and the Scarlattis, Christ Church Cathedral's organ glittered with the unparalleled sparkle for which his touch is so justly famous.
This was rare playing that turned every phrase, every detail, to poetic effect.
The festival closed with a gala concert at the NCH with Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ NSO.
They began with Bach's organ passacaglia as dished up by that ultimate orchestral conman, Leopold Stokowski. After some poorly timed off-the-beat entries, it was only in the closing bars that the NSO seemed to realise just how deliciously preposterous this transcription really is.
It would appear that to programme Symphonie concertante, the chef d'uvre of Walloon impressionist Joseph Jongen, is asking for trouble. Its commissioner, Rodman Wanamaker, died without hearing it.
Its 1927 US première was cancelled when organ soloist Charles Courboin suffered a near-fatal accident. And its Leipzig publisher was later wiped out by Allied bombers.
Its latest victim is organist Nicholas Kynaston, who was forced out of the festival a month ago by a leg injury.
Jongen's demanding solo part thus passed to an undaunted Peter Sweeney, who played it with aplomb.
Though Sweeney got the first movement off to a crisper start than the orchestra did, things soon consolidated into a lively and well-balanced dialogue. In the Ravel-like slow movement, Markson hit on a perfect sarabande tempo at which there flowed some exquisite tonal matching from the woodwind and a cool cantabile from the violins.
In these luxuriant surroundings, there was little Sweeney could do to smooth off the hard edges of the NCH organ's tone.
Like Janácek's other late works, the Glagolitic Mass roams through virgin territories of sound whose ways are impressively obscure. With a confident team of soloists - poised soprano Lynda Lee, mezzo Colette McGahon, stentorian tenor Peter Svensson and mellow bass Philip O'Reilly - Markson led the orchestra on a campaign that brought home some, though not all, of the work's reckless thrills.
There was white heat, however, in the two organ solos played by Mark Duley, the festival's artistic director.
To him also goes the credit for drilling a scaled-down yet remarkably adept RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, who were supremely unabashed by the music's strangeness.
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry House, Co Cork
Bach: Cello Suite No 1. Bartók: Violin Sonata No 2. Ravel: Piano Trio. Beethoven: Quartet in F minor Op 95.
Statistics rarely tell the whole story. But in the case of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival they certainly tell a lot. The first festival presented 14 concerts over seven days in June 1996. The tenth, which opened on Saturday, will present 37 concerts over nine days, and there's been a seven-fold increase in the significant strand of master classes which has always been an integral part of the festival.
The overall expansion has not merely been a matter of more and more of the same. The trawl for artists and repertoire has reached wider and wider. In 1996 the only living composers to be represented were from Britain and Ireland. Now the new music is altogether more diverse in origin, and this year's programmes will embrace composers from the Ukraine and Armenia as well as others closer to home.
Saturday's opening concert offered a programme that could have been presented by just five musicians.
But the Bantry way of mixing and matching is different, so 10 were involved - the effect is of a smorgasbord rather than the conventional concert's modest table d'hôte.
Bach's First Cello Suite was played by Dutchman Pieter Wispelwey, making a first appearance in Bantry, Bartók's Second Violin Sonata by Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, a West Cork veteran, and Romanian pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa, another newcomer.
Ravel's Piano Trio marked the festival début of the Trio Wanderer from France, and Beethoven's Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 was played by Bantry's home team, the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet.
Wispelwey's Bach was, frankly, a disappointment. The tone was as restricted in expressive range as someone speaking through a head cold, the interpretative hesitations mannered, some of the tempo choices - and particularly the gear changes - less than persuasive.
Wispelwey is a musician who lives and works on both sides of the period instrument/modern instrument divide and has a well-deserved reputation as a recording artist of rare imagination.
On this occasion, perhaps, he was simply taking too far his view that Bach's cello suites are not "unfathomably profound music by a deeply religious composer advanced in years".
Kopatchinskaja is another musician who can be expected to take a fresh slant on whatever she plays.
Her approach to the Bartók was febrile, her hair-trigger responses charting the music's darting, weaving course with sharp outlines. Ursuleasa's equally quick responses contributed to an account of this dissonant work that was unusually bracingly brittle in its effect.
Trio Wanderer captured the warm harmonic glow of the Ravel with idiomatic certainty. The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet,who had opened the evening with an unadvertised bonus - Philip Martin's "Celebration Quartet", an anniversary gift to the festival team from the Friends and Patrons Committee - presented Beethoven's concisely-argued Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 tersely and to the point. The magic of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was once again weaving its spell.
