Morrighan - Fergus Johnston
Again into Light No 1 - Mike Vaughan
Deuce - Evelyn Ficarra
Again into Light Nos 3, 4 - Mike Vaughan
After Image - Simon Waters
Overture to Orpheus - Louis Andriessen
TimeSpace - Simon Emmerson
Silence . . . (dissolved) - Mike Vaughan
Flautist Eleanor Dawson and harpsichordist Jane Chapman are among the significant group of specialist performers on historical instruments who are also committed to new music.
The opening concert in this year's Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music in Belfast highlighted the relationship between these two especially creative areas.
There were several premieres, and just one of the nine items was not composed specifically for Dawson and Chapman. That was Overture to Orpheus for solo harpsichord, by the only composer from outside Britain and Ireland, Louis Andriessen.
Jane Chapman's disciplined delivery was typical of the evening. Confidence was also seen in Simon Waters's After Image, even though Eleanor Dawson had to accommodate a pre-recorded CD which skipped several times.
Like most pieces in the concert, Waters exploits the distinctive sound of the historic instrument. It reshapes the solo flute writing of Telemann's fantasias, through a beautifully coloured, tantalising mixture of historic association and modern thought.
Fergus Johnston's Morrighan draws on extra-musical imagery in a way I found sometimes too pictorial, but it effectively uses electronic intervention to depict the shapeshifting Celtic goddess.
Several of the composers' programme notes suggested a desire for structure within the infinite sonorous possibilities of electronic music.
The tight, animated discourse between instruments and live electronics in Simon Emmerson's Time-Space was arresting.
So was the terse thinking of the three pieces from Mike Vaughan's ever-developing project, Again into Light.
But one of the most remarkable realisations of those aims was another of Vaughan's open-ended projects, Silence . . . (dissolved), which now exists in five versions, all for Jane Chapman and various instrumental and electronic groupings. In combining, over considerable time, richness, spontaneity and gestural tightness, this is an impressive work.
The Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music continues in Belfast until Friday, May 11th. Sunday night's concert by the Lotus String Quartet is cancelled because of illness.
For festival details, telephone 02890-335337, e-mail sonorities@qub.ac.uk or check www.sonorities.org.uk
