Ensemble ICC

NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin

The monthly concerts presented by the Irish Composers’ Collective (ICC) at the National Concert Hall’s Kevin Barry Room are something of a lucky dip. The gigs have something of the air of an informal workshop. Previous concerts have included pre-music talks, but this one abandoned the separation between talk and performance and had each composer introducing his or her piece just before it was played.

As spokespeople, the composers ranged from reticent to voluble, with most of the pieces falling towards the shyer, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin end of the spectrum.

In advance of Amanda Feery's Rattlefor bass clarinet, it fell to the performer, the dedicated Paul Roe, not the composer, to drop the hint that the rattle of the title was a rattling or wheezy chest. The piece, written to a running rhythmic pattern, veers off its initial pitch to venture towards the extremes of the instrument's register, adding florid runs and trills and some multiphonics before reaching its conclusion.

There was a related idea of a rhythmic anchor in Dylan Rynhart's Toot-Twang-ShaBang, with guitar (Philip Lawson) providing the anchor and clarinet (this time not a bass clarinet) weaving playfully angular patterns above it (the piece was sparked by the idea of speech melody). Parts of the piece had an amiability that could have been used to set the mood for a rural idyll in a mildly comic movie.

David Bremner's Composure, a graphic composition for bass clarinet, was performed with the rather surreal-looking score projected on to a screen so that everyone could see the freedoms that were granted to the performer. The actual music sounded much more constrained than the visual imagery suggested.

Richard Gill's Teeth, for clarinet and guitar, was a stop-go creation that had more than a whiff of a Paris Conservatoire test piece about it. Bill McGrath's Trench, for guitar, set out to descend into a climax rather than rise to one, and did so without making any lasting impression. And Emma O'Halloran's Metanoiarecycled an earlier clarinet piece to produce a work for clarinet and tape that had some of the liveliest sounds of the evening.