Vox 21/Armada Theatre Company

MiniStories - Haflidi Hallgrimsson

There was no lack of novelty in Thursday's concert in the Mostly Modern series at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre. Vox 21 is a recently-formed group that plans to be active in the area of new music.

Armada Theatre Company "intends to stage both Irish and European works not previously performed here". And the initial collaboration between the two was in a music theatre piece by the Icelandic composer, Haflidi Hallgrimsson, whose work is new to the concert stage in Ireland.

Hallgrimsson, who was born in 1941, led a successful career as a cellist before he turned to full-time composition after leaving his post as principal cellist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

He studied composition under Alan Bush and Peter Maxwell Davies, and success came relatively quickly - his Poemi for violin and orchestra won the Nordic Council Prize in 1986, just a couple of years into his professional composing career. His Mini- Stories juxtaposes absurdist texts by the Russian writer Daniil Kharms with short musical interludes. For most of the work, music and text remain on different planes, and the contrasts between the two were heightened in the Vox 21/Armada presentation directed by Julia Canosa i Serra.

The music is cryptic and introverted, at times laconic in the extreme. Actress Camilla Dalby adopted a larger-than-life story-telling mode, rich but not consistent in the range of regional accents attempted.

The exaggerations of the acting tended to highlight the fragility of the music in a performance where the tinniness of some of the musical gestures seemed to leave the players at times more nervous than confident. The music was most strongly served by Conor Sheil (clarinet), David Brophy (harmonium and piano), who also conducted unobtrusively, and Sylvia O'Brien (soprano).