REVIEWS: The Irish Times reviews The Crash Ensemble, Earthquake Dance and St Matthew's Passion in today's paper.
The Crash Ensemble, back from appearances in Canada at the new music exchange project, "Voyages Dublin-Montreal", and in an "Alternative St Pat's Day" at the Chicago Cultural Centre, performed Transatlantiques, a programme of US, Canadian and Irish music at the Project on Saturday.Harry Partch (1901-74) was a real US maverick, whose work is rarely heard because the composer wrote for special, microtonal instruments of his own invention. It was actually as recently as 1998 that these instruments travelled to Europe for the first time. The Crash Ensemble represented his work in a showing of the film Rotate the Body, with Partch's mixture of strange-sounding intervals and material of an almost naive directness, accompanying a film of gymnastics (or tumbling, as he called it), where the simplest of filmic devices produced that sort of wonderment that Frenchman Jean Cocteau was so famous for.
The French-born, long-time Canadian resident Francis Dhomont, now in his mid-70s, is an important figure in the world of electro-acoustic music. His Points de fuite (Vanishing Points) of 1982 showed a sophisticated palette, but seemed to split its spatial imagery between extremes of left and right, as if one of the channels were out of phase. The other new electro-acoustic work in the programme, Donnacha Dennehy's Tones, Loops and Blips, created rapid hocketing effects with what sounded like fragments of disco material, taking the ears on a journey resembling the rapid eye movements of an umpire at a ping-pong match. None of the evening's other new works, by Marie Pelletier, Michel Gonneville, and Michel Frigon, made much of an impression. The lazily expanding spatial effects and imitations of Pelletier's Nilbud/Han 28 seemed to embody the greatest potential. Network Slammer by Zack Browning, high-impulse music for flute with intentionally cheesy synthesized sound, rather palled on a second hearing (Crash premiered it in 1998), and Vent for flute and piano, by David Lang of Bang on a Can fame, sounded like a piece expressed in the wrong medium.
This was not one of the Crash Ensemble's better programmes, an impression reinforced by the decision to leave some stage lighting on during the video showing of the Partch, but have it completely off during the Dhomont.
