NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin
Laura Kilty – Slidings
Francis Heery – Lapse
Amanda Feery – Pulse Presses
David Bremner – I just have the one tune
Peter Moran – Trio Scordatura
Daniel Barkley – Tides
The Irish Composers’ Collective ended its 2010 monthly concert series on Monday with a focus on that most challenging medium, the string quartet. And it may well be an indication of how daunted the members of the collective feel about the writing of quartets that the Dublin String Quartet’s programme included two string trios as well as four quartets.
The first of the trios, Laura Kilty's Slidings, is one of those works which does what it says on the tin. It's a minimalist piece, with echoes of some famous minimalist moments, and the music slides slowly off the rails until it begins to drown, the live players overcome by the sounds of live electronics. Amanda Feery's Pulse Pressesfor quartet was also overtly minimalist in its busy patterning.
Peter Moran's Trio Scordatura,again as its title suggests, involves retuned instruments and much use of grating microtonal tensions. Francis Heery's Lapseinhabited a world of quiet etiolation, an aural landscape of rustles and whistles that came most sharply into focus through the interruption of occasional plucking.
David Bremner's I just have the one tunebrought the techniques best-known through the prepared piano to the world of the quartet. He chose to alter the sound of the instruments by having paper clips inserted between the strings as a kind of compensatory gesture in a piece that restricted itself to the simplest of material.
What all of these works had in common was the effective rejection of the centuries-old heritage of the quartet as a medium.
Daniel Barkley's Tidestook the opposite approach, glorying instead in the sounds of the medium's great legacy.
The placing of Tidesat the end of the evening made a lot of sense. In the context of all that had gone before, it came across as the evening's most old-fashioned offering, but also, in a strange way, the most daring undertaking. It seemed to strike a chord with the players, too, whose handling of the other works showed rather too many moments of tentative delivery.
