march 2005

Although I should perhaps commence with a response to the main focus, three commissions from RTE to three Irish musicians tempt me by their explicit reference to this element of re-creation. Frank Corcoran, Rachel Holstead and Fergus Johnston each created music texts that were a complete success in my opinion, and Frank Corcoran with acerbic wit and his persistent artistic excitement gave a talk, and an introduction to the Electronic Music performances that were hopefully recorded and can be relished in the future. Corcoran's Quasi una Visione cast its vision over Irish history effectively and is a classic performance that enables references, almost pictures, of the fertile struggle that eclipsed this small nation for so many centuries and notates for us the logo of Sweeney or "the mad Irish". Unusual individuals were forced during our history to react in the face of violent suppression that could not be overturned, a history of colonialism that was eventually terminated in the South of the island, but there again,in the early 1900's, by extraordinary individuals. His material seems to describe this long history receding into memory, despite it's stubborn pace, and the gradual understanding that the Irish realise. Though Ireland may now be celebrated by parade and percussion, it is nevertheless the individual, sometimes in solitude, unrecognised, who is still pushing open the doors of knowledge and creative life - to quote Corcoran himself: "At the end high piano and harp and glassy wind-chimes and tambourine say it all."

Fergus Johnston created an eclipse of the sun in an ice shrouded world. He positionedthe instruments of the orchestra so that he could build that final diamond ring of light, and that shocking black circle of shadow.After a light percussive intro. he suddenly tore the screen aside to reveal the intense light reflective world of the polar ice. The very high pitched reverberation and the suggestions of the water, nevertheless a liquid, that underlies that bleak, magnificent, landscape, also gave us the music of extraordinary silence as it were, holding an extraordinary powerful force in abeyance. Creases in time and boltforce shocks in the reverberating silence, of ice fracturing, of shafts of light gradually focussing from the sun as the eclipse progresses, and these shafts twisting and gradually encircling the globe in vision until suddenly the final perfect shadow-ring is exposed in the night sky. A serene yet powerful creation.

Rachel Holstead was the third Irish representative and the only woman composer in performance. (Dozens of fine instrumental players are now women in orchestras)Her piece Roses for Icarus could be assumed a warning for young composers, of which she is one, of the complexities and the limitations of music. However her work in my mind was entirely a depiction of fragility emerging and being created out of the duress of nature. It perfectly, for instance, depicted the birth of the fragile perfect dragonfly from the ugly pebble encrusted tube-casing of its crysalis that lay underwater for so long. This the way the huge wings folded and creased within that little tube must emerge in their glittering transparent perfection. Played by the Vanbrugh String Quartet who allowed her to assault their instruments with incredible motifs that depicted this, a grating of bows on looses string or strings, chords breaking down into fractured pottery and then suddenly the lovely freedom of flight into the air gyrating around us.

As my page lengthens out it would be fine if I could say that Irish performers and performances were perfect throughout, but just to get over the hump I will define two opinions of criticism in that regard.On Friday's evening performance there was to be played, and it was played, Jagden and Formen (Hunts and Forms)by Wolfgang Rihm, by the Ensemble Moderne orchestra from Frankfurt. This music is famous in Europe, but performance of it has to be under the ultimate control of a fine strong hand to which, regretably, Sian Edwards could not lay claim. The music almost certainly cast a ribald gesture at both her and the audience as it raced across the consciousness. Have you ever been a sensitive person at your first Spanish Bull-fight? The event was like that for me, every moment was out of control, was awful (awe not murderous), unstoppable, and the instrumentalists, especially one young cellist, seemed to reach to the pitch of hysteria (where she burst out laughing). This music maybe the sea, maybe European city life surveyed by a frightened refugee from the pastures of Ukraine, maybe sex, maybe noise being turned into silence, maybe the onslaught of tsunami. Kevin O'Connell wrote in the excellent programme: this music can sound like a person of high intelligence who is afflicted with mania telling you......, and indeed that image is what I must come to next for on Sunday the last performance was Henz Werner Henze' 7th Symphony which is modelled on a poem that exposes the positive and negative extremes of isolated individual thought, Halfte des Lebens. Already on Saturday a performance was given of Henze's Kammermusik that adhered to lines that were collected from papers that the poet Holderlin, in a psychiatric hospital, was writing just before his death. With this knowledge in hand of the writings of Holderlin and the fact that this other, a short poem of his, turns right round on itself thus:

With yellow pears and
filled
with wild roses the land
hangs over the lake,
and the lovely swans,
drunk with a kiss...
you dip your heads
in the sacramentally
crystalline water.

Alas, when it is winter
where
shall I find the flowers
and where
the sunshine,
where the earth's
shadows?
The walls stand
speechless and cold, in
the wind
the flags are jangling

the RTE National Symphony Orchestra did not clarify either turn or give a true definition of difference. They allowed progress in time, by pauses, only define where they were within it's orchestral progress. The music itself defines in the first instance a consensual human harmony that is intruded upon and then configured in danger. The music then reminds the listener that man's spirit is all that he has left aligned to him by nature. That within nature, despite storms and desolation there is no crude experiment played out. The French horn that classically has called communities to the Hunt is here configured to reveal man's innate natural strength, a life of peace without violence. The orchestra then seems to reveal all the different modulations that individual instruments could give in beauty to this harmony, until a sudden crude measure cries out "Beware". Crude barks like Cerebus at the gates of hell are heard. At this point the orchestra should perhaps instead of recreating the special harmonies of man in acceptance of his fate, have been able to create a vision of that bleak future if the crude political and scientific experiments with mankind's life intervene and we reach the gates of hell. Instead the orchestra seemed impervious to anything but the need to finish-off this festival with Triumph!

Is it possible now to return to the core of this festival and still retain your interest; because there is certainly more to say? Hans Werner Henze is perhaps in Europe clearly seen as not only a bridgehead but an entire bridge across which the eternal mystery of organic music flows, wether popular music of the street or of the concert-hall,or music's intellectual complexities, or material for which the spirit hungers in this life, music that dictates no dream or illusion but which gathers us as if into a journey to a strange land that has an identity in memory but largely gives new potentials for you, the listener, that you personally can harbour in your mind as signposts for freedom, and meaning; of youth,of work, and play. Yes this man is a formidable philosopher who does not give us a lethal dose of advice, or any elitist creative burden.

As a homosexual he is not into proseltysing a defined view of life; the first performance this weekend was Orpheus behind the Wire. Henze's two-act ballet depicts Orpheus, the legendary Greek figure of Love bringing order and beauty from man's spirit, that reveals its true allegiance to Nature, with an allegiance of spirit between man and woman that both acknowledge as not only a biological creative force but also a mental allegiance against trhe evils of this world.. Our National Chamber Choir conducted by the Brazilian Celso Antunes added the texts of this poem to a group of remarkable performances that broke away from our traditional notion about choir performance altogether. The Choir has been brought by their conductor to an exceptional level of musical and vocal diversity. The performance included six songs by the poet Rilke, music by Hindemith; three poems of James Joyce, music by Robin Holloway,; a religious work by Thomas Ades, The Fairfax Carol; And two madrigals by Sir Micheal Tippett, with a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins that Tippett configures in musical metaphores from the lines of the poem. This was followed by Henze's L'Heure Bleu another excercise in musical metaphors. Thus we were launched on a weekend of musical diversity of intensity, of healing and understanding.

There followed on Saturday and Sunday performances of work by Oliver Knussen, Birtwhistle,Alexander Goehr and an interesting lecture was given by Professor Jens Brockmeier. This lecture indicated that although much of the music we would be listening to was written between late 1940s and end l970s we should understand that this was a period of almost despairing re-creation of artistic and musical spirit - that had endured the appalling realisation of victory as a military devastation that far outweighed any moral attitudes against war. The devastation was to the innocence of populations, mercilessly used by National "interests" that lie only within the Cannon of History. A historical Cannon that it seems we must break away from, if we are ever to know Mankind's true potential. We now realise, in 2005, that powerful individuals and governments in this world have no intention of laying aside the motivation of Power-play or National interest in the imagined supremacy of financial and military power. He spoke of the fact that textual material about the war was forbidden for some time after the Peace declaration, a sanction that publishers took full part in, and apparently many still do. Infact it is only now that we are learning some of the truths that have also been conveniently hidden by political sources in order to maintain a dubious moral power. Henze himself has driven his musical ambitions in tandem with texts and material of many writers from the past. We experienced afterwards, listening to his music, the technical blurring of music and words, the vivid power of colours and materials and thoughts that find resonance in his work. Of politics, Henze said, "I came to the Left like anyone else..."

The programme of Electronic Music put together by Frank Corcoran was also very persuasive against the flat statement: "I hate electronic music."Especially his collaboration with Roger Doyle (who amused us confessing that he might not listen to the content of a conversation with anyone or an advertisement on the TV, but only hear the musical sport or clamour of the aural voices and exercise he was taking!)Doyle made a short work on the intonations of Corcoran's voice that gave an explicit example of this.

Works by Simon Bainbridge and Franco Donatoni pushed forward along this creative line experimenting with the ability of instrumental music to give metaphors of feeling that are positive identifications - Donatoni's Hot, a case in point. With swerving registers of notes he created a sense of boiling liquids and a top screen of notes that suggested a steaming miasma and the introduction of background notes plucked on the cello created the hesitant realisation of the listener, leads by saxaphone creating a protest as the heat builds in intemperate chaos with a huge pulse emerging.

We did not have a full print out of the poem for voice and guitar by Henze, constructed on Holderlin's last written lines. The images seemed to have a plaintive call that I reciprocated with at the time thus: ..........................we have all these beautiful sounds to contribute, nearby, faraway, there, coming, calling, dancing , heavy is light, measures declare it, a voice "there is joy I promise" even as you rush by.... take it with you; the voice and the guitar state "it was always like this if you listened... our history reverberates yet among all people; roused from a dream you will see this truth..yes..I ask you.. a sign is all we need to agree.. silence too is part of it....this serious sad time we are in, it seems almost eternal, memory does not relieve it,........... healing comes quietly, have faith in it, lay claim to it....don't let go...despair brought me to this creation, my gift, I want to give it to the future... peace will underlie all silence, all that impedes you... now, now you will feel the urge to stand still.

According to Professor Brockmeier, Henze music signals a retreat from mystery, an opening-up to clarity concerned with the mental processes that must be strengthened . He was from his earliest music performances conscious of the mental trauma of his audiences, and, insofar as texts began to emerge intertwined with his musical concepts, we come to an understanding of the world, more easily, with music to aid us. Music develops the complex tension between us so that we can take a pathway toward understanding. Listening to Birtwhistle's Call of Anubis one can hear a contrast to this in some way, the mystery of a mythical beast is personified by the frightful low harsh snarls of the Tuba. But around this phenomena there is something like the emanation and lament of imaginary worlds. In the end Birtwhistle's symbol of the call occurs too often, the music text repeats it again and again. There are too many of these frightful echoes of horror, and the work moves away from one diminished by a misjudgement of the symbolic purpose.

Igor Stravinsky was represented by what I would describe as the one misjudgement of this exceptionally interesting programme created for us by Kevin O'Connell. It was made long long after his Rites of Spring , - but "Orpheus" might have been brought in to complete the original reference at the beginning of the programme on Friday, Orpheus behind the Wire. In 1947, when Stravinsky wrote it, it was certainly a year of cumulative despair. We experienced and witnessed the ravage and result of War. But this piece actually heralds a kind of syncopated dumbing down of symphonic mores.It was also written for ballet performance but entirely lacked the variety and intensity of Henze' work. Curiously enough there is also a condemnation of Apollo's censure delivered in the myth when he comes down from among the gods to claim Orpheus' harp. And somehow one wonders just what is the meaning of introducing this last violence of Apollo, who set an eagle on his prisoner,Prometheus,( he who brought us fire), and flayed another young man for daring to challenge Apollo's music with a unique performance of his own. Apollo and his wolves? Remember?

Matthias Pintscher in the final programme on Sunday , with en sourdine, created for this listener the axiom of the Festival. He placed the solo violinist in a crucial juxtaposition with the entire orchestra. The violinist, (the individual, maybe?) could not escape the template of the ego. The orchestra persuasive, sardonic and overwhelming by turns cannot prevail for the soloist to come to coherence with them. A coherence that is suggested by a sweet echoing of several violin performers. The soloist rejects and allows no coercion over this independent and obstinate spirit of.......the spirit of the artist?
jocelyn braddell©