NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin
John Luther Adams – Among Red Mountains.
Bunita Marcus – Julia.
Jane O’Leary – Breathing Spaces. Gerard Beljon – Beat. Jacob ter Veldhuis – The Body of Your Dreams.
The inspirations behind the piano pieces in Monday’s Kevin Barry Room recital by New York-based Irish pianist Isabelle O’Connell were about as diverse as you could wish for.
Mississippi-born, Alaska-based John Luther Adams was sparked to write his Among Red Mountainsin 2001 by a Frank Stella painting in Seattle Airport in which, as the composer puts it, "arcs of bright colours weave in and out of one another in a dizzying counterpoint of imaginary planes".
He also had in his head the layered multiple tempos of a composition by Kyle Gann, and set out to try to suggest “five independent tempo planes, within the limitations of two hands”. The strange thing about the outcome is the way that the almost cluster-like density of the chords he uses make the piece seem so one-dimensional.
Bunita Marcus's Julia(1989) was commissioned as one of a series of Beatles arrangements by Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi. It's a gentle, slow-motion explosion of the John Lennon song, the falling pattern of the melody foregone in favour of a decoration of the harmony, the notes falling like soft rain, in sometimes neo-Chopinesque flurries.
Jane O'Leary's Breathing Spaces, written last year for Isabelle O'Connell, was inspired by one of the composer's favourite New York buildings, the spirally curving Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. O'Leary is a composer fond of evocation, which this piece explores through much hands-on work directly on the strings of the piano.
Dutch composer Gerard Beljon says his Beat(2003) was an attempt to write "direct and clear music while using simple material", and points to Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata and Jerry Lee Lewis as reference points. The punchy piece has something not quite endearingly childlike in its corner-cutting directness, almost as if it were an improvisation on a musical subject that's been imperfectly remembered.
Self-styled Dutch "avant pop" composer Jacob ter Veldhuis (also known as Jacob TV) took the spoken sales pitches from TV infomercials for the electronic muscle stimulation device, the AbTronic Pro, and turned them into the musical pitches of his The Body of Your Dreams(2003) for piano and soundtrack. The electronic chopping up of product endorsements delivered with smiling enthusiasm is briefly amusing. But the piece, even in Isabelle O'Connell's faithful hands, didn't really build successfully on its opening premise.
