Reviews

Michael Dungan reviews Lawson, Chateauneuf, Vox 21/Brophy at the John Field Room, NCH, Dublin

Dowland - Songs. Benjamin Dwyer - Scenes from Crow

The Yorkshire-born poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is most widely known for his 1968 children's novella The Iron Man, a parable of life, death and fear in the cold war era.

Three years later, Hughes explored similar themes in the harsher setting of his 65-odd Crow poems. These became the inspiration for composer Benjamin Dwyer's long-gestating multimedia work, Scenes from Crow, which received its premiere in the first of this year's Composer's Choice concerts.

Dwyer's music - parts of which have been performed publicly before - is an intense, deeply personal, often enigmatic response to the poems. The work is scored for an ensemble of winds, strings, voice and percussion, as well as taped and live electronics.

This makes the scope for diversity very large, and the music travels great distances over the course of its 60-minute duration, switching easily between harsh and mysterious, tense and tranquil. However, despite the diversity there is an underlying grim atmosphere that runs through the piece and feels consistent with that sustained by Hughes.

To Dwyer's credit, it made you want to become better acquainted with the Crow poems and then hope to discern more from the music at another hearing. Until such time, however, the additional interpretive layer created by visual artist David Farrell was a welcome and seamlessly integrated addition.

Farrell leads you toward the unfathomable by sometimes first dwelling on what's clearest: a mushroom cloud, a large flock of crows wheeling in the distant sky, an empty landscape.

Visuals and music - given a gutsy performance by Vox 21 under David Brophy, with the technical assistance of sound engineer Roy Carroll - went hand-in-glove to produce art of real power.

The concert opened with a selection of Dowland's songs and lute music. Soprano Mhairi Lawson's singing was rhythmically light and verbally alive, a perfect match to the gentle accompaniment by lutist Paula Chateauneuf.