A LARGE balloon floats atop Connolly Hall, Cork. In large letters it proclaims the "Equitable Life Cork International Choral Festival", to celebrate one of Ireland's most enduring musical events (the festival is now in its 44th year), and to credit the festival's new sponsor.
As always, the city is brimming with musical activity. City Hall is booked for concerts and for the main choral event, the Fleischmann International Trophy Competition. Other venues are busy with the other competitions.
The festival includes alternatives to the choral competition diet, which tends to major in technical flash and to minor in artistic substance. One instance was a rewarding lunchtime performance, by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 130, with the "Grosse Fuge" finale.
Another dietary alternative and probably the festival's most important contribution to choral music, is the seminar on contemporary choral music. Now in its 34th year, and organised jointly with UCC's music department, the seminar commissions compositions for unaccompanied choir from composers within and outside Ireland. The list of works and composers is impressive, and several works have entered the mainstream choral repertoire.
This year's seminar was, by some margin, the best of the several I have attended over the last 10 years or so. It was held on Thursday and Friday in the Granary Theatre, a much less pleasant environment and acoustic than the usual venue, the Aula Maxima at UCC. Three composers (the usual number), provided new works: Gerald Barry from Ireland, Nicola LeFanu from England but of Irish parentage, and the Hungarian Miklos Csemiczky.
The seminar followed the usual format. Each session was devoted to one work, and began with a performance. Then came an analysis by the seminar's chairman, David Cox (the music professor at UCC), and a second performance. The composer explained his or her approach to the composition of the piece, and there was an open discussion between composer, audience, choir and conductor. Finally, there was a third performance. Cantique, conducted by Blanaid Murphy, sang securely and effectively, and gave each work a public performance the following day at City Hall.
For the first time in my experience, all the commissioned works are likely to attract the attention of the international choral world. The composers spoke of the text, of ideas, metaphors, musical style and 59 on. Technique was what it should be a servant.
Le Fanu and Csemiczky work as teachers, the former at York University and the latter at the Bela Bartok Music Secondary School, and both have written plenty of choral, music. Barry escaped from academia some years ago, and: has written little for choirs. These differences showed, especially with Barry, whose music and discussion amiably cocked a snook at convention.
His The Coming of Winter subjects an old Irish text to mechanistic repetitions of bald material. The text is stated, repeated with misplaced accents, presented backwards, then fragmented in its backwards version. This calculated perversion was, Barry said, an examination of the text less as the carrier of specific meaning than as an object, embodying a general expressive concept. What food for thought and talk! Barry's oblique and provocative responses to questions seemed consistent with his music. "Why not?", he said. I was not the only one to wonder whether he was taking the mickey, and seriously.
Csemiczky's motets Ho die Christus Natus Est and Ave Regina Cadorum are part of a string of Latin settings composed over several years. This former serialist explained, via an interpreter, that he had turned to a modern version of old styles to communicate more widely, and to draw on historical roots. He is not the only composer from former communist countries to do so, and to have met the stylistic challenge.
Initial qualms about the conservative vocabulary - akin to Bartok's modal chromaticism were dispelled by Csemiczky's discipline and expressive focus. His superlative contrapuntal craftsmanship and economy produces inherent progression. He is almost austere, and resists the temptations offered by his scrumptious harmonic vocabulary. More than any of the seminar's commissioned works I have heard recently, these motets seemed a case of art hiding art.
Nicola LeFanu's discussion of On the Wind - a Lament, and the comments of Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, who collaborated with her when writing the text, were revealing about a piece primarily concerned with timbre. Choir and audience warmed to the music. One came to hear a consistency behind surface complexity: the music moves in waves, responding to the text; and it reflects text repetitions via recurrences of closepitch sonorities. Its technical demands place it beyond many choirs. But I would be surprised if it is not gobbled up by specialists.