NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin

Francis Heery

– Opaque Passages.

Dylan Curran

– Fourth Song, A Dream Deferred.

Amanda  Feery

– Boreal.

Dylan Rynhart

– Organ Donation (Give up Your Bits).

Matthew Whiteside

– Imagined Notes.

Emma O’Halloran

– Chronotope.

Ensemble ICC, the performing arm of the Irish Composers’ Collective, is a flexible entity. Its size and composition varies from gig to gig and this programme at the National Concert Hall’s Kevin Barry Room involved just two performers, Sinéad Farrell (flute) and Cora Venus Lunny (viola), with each player offering a selection of pieces for her own instrument.

The solo repertoire for melodic instruments which can’t sustain their own accompaniment is about as challenging as it gets. Those towering achievements of the 18th century, Bach’s works for solo violin, flute and cello, had to wait until the early 20th century to find worthy successors (though Bach, of course, wasn’t the first composer to shine in solo repertoire – there was something of a golden age in the era of the viola da gamba).

There were three viola pieces on offer from Cora Venus Lunny. She opened with Francis Heery’s

Untitled Passages

, inspired by the text-like, wordless drawings of Henri Michaux, which struck the composer as “a sort of elegant, less frantic glossolalia in writing”. The music moves through a world of ghostly tremblings, tremolos and waverings, favouring tentativeness over assurance.

Tremolo was also a feature of Amanda Feery’s

Boreal

, where its energy contrasted with a feeling of stasis, the interruptions serving as a kind of seed out of which a sometimes elaborately ornamented melody sought to grow.

Dylan Rynhart’s

Organ Donation (Give up Your Bits)

made much use of phrases that ran and stopped, but the running had touches of a headlong energy that sustained a sense of drive in spite of the fragmentation of rhythm.

Dylan Curran’s

Fourth Song, A Dream Deferred

is a flute arrangement of the fourth of a set of songs for solo violin, inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music tries “to capture some of the natural rhythmic qualities of his verse”. On flute, the piece worked at the romantically evocative end of the instrument’s reach.

Emma O’Halloran framed her Chronotope with scarcely audible whistlings of air, bringing to mind the flute sounds that have been explored with such thoroughness by Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.

But the evening’s most fascinating evocations were in the electro-acoustic piece,

Imagined Notes

, by Matthew Whiteside. Starting from sampled sounds of piano and oboe, he used electronic alchemy to create a soundscape of mock-vocalisations (sometimes sounding like a chorus of beings halfway between man and sheep) interrupted by industrial grinding. Those moments in which his sources were most clearly revealed were his least successful.