Siona International Festival of Music

OVER the weekend, from Thursday to Saturday, the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick presented, in association with Toyota Ireland, the first Sionna Festival.

The first of Friday's events was the first public performance, at the Limerick City Gallery, of Michael Alcorn's Caoine. This piece was written for the Irish Chamber Orchestra to play within the gallery in widely separated groups, the sound amplified. processed and complemented by interactive computer electronics supervised by the composer.

Alcorn's work here has a sort of super naivety, born, apparently, of a sauce on everything principle which presumes rather than demonstrates the benefits of electronic processing. The chosen musical material for his exercise in interactive keening was banal, its working into lingering, clustery masses trite. It seemed extraordinary, given the technology involved, that sightlines had to be kept clear for some of the players to see the conductor (in this case, Alcorn), still, it would seem, the most important of interactive controllers.

There was no conductor at the evening concert in the University Concert Hall, when the ICO, led by Fionnuala Hunt, played Gerald Barry's demanding new La Jalousie Taciturne, written for the orchestra's complement of 16 strings, though performable in larger configurations.

The rocketing punchiness of the opening (all staccato at a dynamic level at ffff), conceived as a string orchestra equivalent of playing the piano with your fists, is one at the funniest openings I've ever heard, and Barry carries it through with typical focus and relentlessness. The length to which he is prepared to take this idea is part of what makes it so reliable.

The sound world is as Barryish as ever (though, in the absence of the piercing possibilities of wind, it's softer in texture than most of his work) and the music is structured in the composer's familiar jump cutting style. The first big shift is into pockets of quiet pizzicato, and there are later striking passages of exposed harmonies and calmer melodies which unexpectedly bulge into momentary clusters. The ICO's performance (the fourth within a week of the premiere!) was a real tour de force.

The concert included a solo segment by wander at the age percussionist Evelyn Glennie, here at her best in Javier Alvarez's Temazcal, a marathon for maracas and tape. There was "also a composer led performance by local musicians of Stephen Scott's Arcs for bowed piano ensemble. Colorado based Scott has devised techniques for bowing the strings of a piano, producing in the slowly shifting chords of Arcs a sequence of Aeolian harp like effects.

Perhaps the most exotic of the contributions came from UCC's Nyai Sekar Madu Sari, as the college's gameplan, or Japanese percussion ensemble, is called (the names translates as Venerable Flower of Honey Essence). It's good to see such enterprise and to hear in the flesh the sounds of game plan music. But, during these performances, I couldn't help relating what I was hearing to the likely sounds produced by a group of Japanese student musicians, newly introduced to violins, violas and cellos, undertaking, say, Eine kleine Nachtmusick, or the Barber Adagia.