INTERNATIONAL Women's Day was celebrated on Friday night last by a concert in St Patrick's Hall, Dublin. The works performed were all composed by women and were interspersed with readings by the poet Mary O'Malley.
The abstract nature of music is unsuited to the transmission of feminist ideas, But this lack of ideological direction was compensated for by Mary O'Malley, who played on the sympathies of the largely female audience with her poems, both grave and light, about hormones, gynaecologists, unbaptised infants, Grainne Mhaol, mermaids, and the shortcomings of men, especially those of Connemara - "They only really fall for boats"!
Her casual manner - not having poems ready, stumbling over the occasional word, interrupting poems with footnotes - was not adopted by the choir.
It gave a splendid performance of Elizabeth Maconchy's difficult, richly inventive cycle Creatures in which seven poems have inspired an exotic tapestry of sound, almost lurid in the choice of colours but most satisfyingly related to the texts.
Sylvia Glickman's setting of some brief extracts from Langland's Piers Plowman (in limp modern translation) for choir and piano was like a miniature oratorio bedizened with some modern harmonic ideas which failed to disguise the paucity of inspiration.
