La lugubre gondola - Liszt
Lachrymae - Dowland
Water Music - Handel
Purple Blue - Deirdre McKay
The River - Duke Ellington
The once frowned-upon concert arrangement has been rehabilitated in recent years. The Dutch Calefax Reed Quintet, currently on a Music Network tour, has a non-standard line-up - oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet, bassoon - so their basic repertoire resources are two-fold: arrangements and new works.
Arrangements dominate in the group's water-themed Irish programme. The selection is adventurous. The playing style is polished. But at the Coach House in Dublin Castle on Tuesday, the sense of loss from the process of transcription was great. That strange, still bleakness which imbues so much of late Liszt evaporated in the Calefax's hands. Of the five pieces in the fabricated suite they called La Lugubre Gondola, only the central Schlaflos, with its arpeggiation become like minimalist figuration, held any real interest.
The excerpts from Dowland's "seven tears" became bland, textureless as pulped fruit. The arrangement of Ellington's 1970 ballet The River dragged heavily as a whole, in spite of some unfettered solos and strong chorus work. Handel's Water Music flickered inconsistently into focus, but when it did, the group were heard at their best.
Along with the arrangements there's a new work, Purple Blue, by the Northern Irish composer Deirdre McKay (born 1972). She starts the piece by setting up polarities between the middle (clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet) and outer (oboe and bassoon) instruments, as well as between ideas moving at different paces (the middle instruments in crotchets, the outer in quavers), using the saxophone as a somewhat independent mediator. You could characterise the basic material as striding and chattering and, after a degree of cross-fertilisation, the music resolves in the stillness of long, silence-separated chords. What's wanting is a distinction in the material itself to match the clarity of its processing.
