GERALD BARRY's La Jalousie Taciturne, written for the strings of the Irish
Chamber Orchestra (premiered in Ireland in October and toured in the Netherlands in November) was the new piece which most made me sit up and take notice.
SO much so, in fact, that when it was finished, I just wanted to shear its madness, frost and frenzy all over again.
The music resurfaced as Barry's Second Piano Quartet at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival at the beginning of December. In this latter guise, its moments of violence are a lot more explicit. I preferred the softer edges and greater suggestiveness of the string orchestra, which seemed to offer a fresh opening-out of the composer's style.
With a lot of CDs in the can, awaiting issue in the Arts Council-funded Irish Composer series on Marco Polo, the immediate accessibility of Irish music is about to change significantly. This is doubly true for the Belfast composer, Ian Wilson, who has been taken on by one of the best-known of contemporary music publishing houses, Universal Edition.
Access to the wider world of challenging new music remains an issue of serious concern in Ireland, and my composer of the year is the man who made the single biggest gesture in addressing this. As artistic director of the Sonorities Festival in Belfast, James Clarke created a programme which represented a range of established figures - among them Helmut Lachenmann, Dieter Schnebel, Nicolaus A. Huber and Heinz Holliger - whose music has been almost completely ignored in this part of the world.
Clarke viewed his undertaking in terms, almost, of freedom of speech. However, his position of composer-in-residence at Queen's University (which was what brought him to Belfast in the first place) was de-funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland before his expected term was completed. The good news is that he's still around to programme the next Sonorities, and the festival has now been established to run on an annual basis.
