Exciting complexity

Paginetta, Adagio, - Deploiment

Paginetta, Adagio, - Deploiment

Rene Wohlhauser - Etude

James Clarke sentimento . . . . . . CODA - Anton Safronov Klavidar

Bengt Hambraeus Piano Piece No 4 - Frederic Rzewski

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Vae Victus - Diego Minciacchi

The German pianist Ortwin Sturmer gave an extraordinarily persuasive concert at lunchtime last Thursday in the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre in Foster Place, Dublin. The programme, presented in the Bank of Ireland's "Mostly Modern" series, was devoted to music by composers of the "new complexity" school.

Actually, there is little new about it. The programme - most of which was less than 10 years old, and by composers whose ages range from 70 to 26 - showed concepts and vocabularies descended from the most radical practices of the 1950s and '60s. The intellectual rigour and communicative panache of most of the music make the current penchant for accessibility seem facile and soft-centred. urmer's absorbing strength pushed distractions aside. Each piece had something distinctive to offer, from the rigorous brevity of Etude (1996), by the youngest composer, James Clarke, to the overwhelming elaboration of Diego Minciacchi's Vae Victus (1996) for piano and tape.

Frederic Rzewski's Piano Piece No. 4 (1977) was a highlight. Based on a Chilean folk song, its repeated, gradually shifting chords, layered textures and fragments of identifiable melody sounded as if a demented Erl-King was dancing a modern Mephisto Waltz. Sturmer's range of tone and volume, and his command of gesture, were at their height here and in Bengt Ham braeus's KLAVIDAR (1995), a finely-paced and engaging discourse between contrasted, vivid ideas, which is dedicated to this remarkable pianist.

Tracings

Ormeau Baths, Belfast

By Ian Hill

This exhibition's alternate title, Wall Drawings, has different connotations in the North; for, of the group of four responsible, only Colin Darke brings political baggage to the job. Otherwise it's a tale, shallow and uneven, of an American, a Dutchman, an English man and (by adoption) an Irishman painting the walls of the gallery's four spaces.

Even the concept's irony is left unexplored, top-dollar painters arguing, with maximum publicity, that they now subvert the market which fed them by creating the nontransportable.

Leo de Goede uses a child's palette of tiny discs arranged in circles which evoke, to the kindest stained glass and to the less kind, unfavourable comparison to their children's talents.

Sol Le Witt had assistants paint each wall in two contrasting shiny acrylic colours meeting in rhythmic curve (yellow/green; orange/red; purple/blue; white black) with an oppressive and monumental effect. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Simon Patterson reverses movie icons' names into cinemascopically-proportioned versions of Kodak's Grey Scale with tremendous technical verisimilitude. Such words, he argues, without originality, will suffice without narrative illustration in the mass of media. In the most accessible piece, Colin Darke contrasts with bloody vigour the socialist painter Courbet's 1871 toppling of Napoleon's statue with Marx's sarcastic metaphor on history's weight written two decades earlier.

Until April 25th.

Ulster Orchestra/Christoph Eberle

Ulster Hall, Belfast

By Dermot Gault

Symphony No 101 (`Clock') - Haydn

Violin Concerto in A, K219 - Mozart

Symphony No 4 in B flat, Op 60 - Beethoven

Programmes like this were staple fare in the early years of the Ulster Orchestra, when it had only eight first violins and when four horns seemed an extravagance. Sine then, attitudes to performing the classics have changed. Certainly, the orchestra seems at home with Mozart these days. His fifth and last violin concerto was accompanied with clear, transparent textures, light accentuation and considerable poise.

Lesley Hatfield, the orchestra's leader, played the solo part with a fine, slender tone, a delicacy of expression and a quicksilver technique which suited Mozart perfectly.

Somehow the orchestra - or rather its conductor - did not seem quite as at home in either Haydn or Beethoven. Haydn's Clock symphony was written after Mozart was dead; but, for Eberle, Haydn is a lightweight precursor of Mozart, and his music is to be hurried through on tiptoe. Eberle's Beethoven is also light on its feet; while he was certainly taking the composer's challenging metronome markings into account, he managed to prevent most of it from sounding rushed, and the orchestra responded adroitly, the violins in the finale buzzing like well-trained bees.

There was a fine clarinet solo in the second movement and the scherzo went well, but anyone wanting any particular sense of engagement with the music would have been disappointed.