The composers Gavin Bryars and Frederic Rzewski have a lot in common.
Bryars, Friday, Crash Ensemble/Hempel, O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin
Frederic Rzewski - Coming Together. Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Frederic Rzewski - Main Drag. Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
They're both now of the senior generation - Bryars was born in Goole, Yorkshire, in 1943, Rzewski in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1938 - and they're both composer/performers.
Rzewski is a leading interpreter of some of the most difficult piano music of the 20th century. For instance, he made the first recording of Stockhausen's Piano Piece X in the early 1960s.
Bryars, who founded the notorious Portsmouth Sinfonia (where inability to play was no bar to membership), is a double bassist, and both men have been active in the field of jazz. They have also both made a living as academics, and, while remaining compositionally clear of the mainstream, both have had iconic successes.
Bryars is best known for The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971). Rzewski for his mammoth set of piano variations, The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975) and his Oscar Wilde setting, De Profundis (1992), for a pianist who's also called upon to speak and whistle.
There were significant commonalities, too, in all four pieces chosen for the Crash Ensemble's programme under Jurjen Hempel at O'Reilly Theatre on Thursday.
Bryars's Jesus' Blood and Titanic, and Rzewski's Coming Together (1971) and Main Drag (1999) are all repetitive pieces - so repetitive, in fact, that you might not expect them to work in the same programme.
On this occasion they did, almost. The loops of the plaintive tramp's voice in Jesus' Blood, set to an accompaniment of a slow dynamic arch, manages against all the odds to be strangely touching, and there's a serious playfulness behind the watery blurring that engulfs the hymn-playing of Titanic, which, on Thursday, included some obsessive mutterings from a man in his cups, written specially for the occasion for Gavin Friday.
The "found object" aspect of Bryars's two works is reflected also in Rzewski's Coming Together, a frenetic setting for speaker and ensemble of part of a letter written by Sam Melville, an inmate of the state prison of Attica, New York.
This was delivered with microphone-in-the-mouth, rock-star prima-donna-ish gravitas by Gavin Friday.
The evening's one failure was Rzewski's Main Drag, where the distortion of tone colour introduced by the amplification created problematically fractured textures, through which the instrumental lines seemed to chase their own tails in a less than interesting way.
