Nothing has changed. Everything has changed: New and old meet to create Louth Contemporary Music Festival

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed

Various venues, Dundalk

★★★★

The five-concert festival presented in Dundalk last weekend by Louth Contemporary Music Society (LCMS) had the unusual and truthful title Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

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What has not changed is LCMS artistic director Eamonn Quinn’s non-ideological approach to programming. He is driven by an apparently insatiable musical curiosity, has nerves that allow him take what seem like outrageous risks, and a commissioning policy that’s probably the most catholic in the country. He has delivered recordings almost as a matter of course as well as concerts, and microphones were in evidence throughout the weekend.

And what has changed? Well, the world of the arts is going through a time of sometimes cautious but genuinely joyous reunion and well-filled venues suggested that Quinn’s followers haven’t lost their appetite for a weekend of musical adventuring.

The weekend, which stretched to 15 works, had an arch-like shape. The opening and closing concerts were multi-work, multi-composer events. Between them were two concerts with long single works. And at the centre was a set of improvisations.

The improvisers, both from Iceland, were bass guitarist Skúli Sverrisson and double bassist Bára Gêladóttir, whose style favoured a dense, electronically-generated haze that lingered and reshaped itself in The Spirit Store like smoke in any similar venue before the 2002 smoking ban. Movement was slow, even when there were bursts of activity.

The concerts on either side of this offered extreme contrasts. Catherine Lamb’s Muto Infinitas for quarter-tone bass flute (Rebecca Lane) and double bass (Jon Heilbron) is an extended, patient exploration of microtonal musical interactions between close timbres and pitches, carried out with a ritualistic thoroughness. In the close focus of the chapel of St Vincent’s School the piece came across more as preparatory etude than finished work.

Pascal Dusapin’s O Mensch! for baritone and piano, given like all the other concerts in St Nicholas Church of Ireland, is a setting of early poems by Nietzsche that manages the feat of rehousing the concept of a 19th-century song cycle in a thoroughly convincing 21st-century way. Enjoyment of the endlessly fascinating and highly-theatrical performance by Mitch Riley and Vanessa Wagner, was limited by the failure to provide either the words or translations of the sung texts.

That failure extended to the opening and closing concerts, too, with soprano Juliet Fraser’s sensual delivery of Vincent Woods’s words for Gavin Bryars’s new Wittgenstein Fragments so blended into the delicate texture of solo flute and string quartet (Silvija Ščerbavičiūtė, Esposito Quartet) as to be effectively lost.

The beautiful closing concert by Estonian choir Vox Clamantis under Jaan-Eik Tulve included Siobhán Cleary’s new Storm in Devon, with an impressive opening: pure and penetrating, high, dissonance clashes held in perfect balance. The absence of printed text diminished any detailed sense of the music’s narrative thrust.