Project Arts Centre Schlepper-Connolly/Tynan – The Sun Also Rises

Don’t be taken in by the word orchestra. The Ergodos Orchestra is anything but. At the second and last of this year’s Ergodos Festival concerts at the Project Arts Centre on Saturday it was in fact a piano trio, and Ergodos Voices was a trio of female voices to match.

The inspiration for Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's The Sun Also Risesis a passage from Ecclesiastes,beginning "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." There was, however, not much in the way of hastening in The Sun Also Risesor whirling or running, to borrow some other verbs from Ecclesiastes.

The piece opened with battering repetitions on the piano, has later keyboard evocations of a hurdy-gurdy, and provided relief in the form of uneventful instrumental passages and slow angelic writing for the voices.

At times there are grainy projections of almost static or sometimes looping images filmed by David Tynan – a man gazing out to sea at a low sun as a ship passes, a woman standing motionless at an intersection while people flow busily around her, the lights of an underground tunnel flashing by, shuddery shots of what could be taken for 1960s home movies of a country trip.

It’s the kind thing that could well come across as loaded with resonance – the images of isolation and loneliness are cast aside as the man and woman are finally seen clinging together. But the music didn’t carry it, neither the density of the heavy piano pummelling nor the lightness elsewhere seemed to have any substance.

The effect was flat, disappointing, empty.