NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin
The opening concert of this year’s New Sound Worlds series, presented by Ireland Promoting New Music (IPNM), focused on the work of one of Germany’s leading composers, Helmut Lachenmann.
Lachenmann, who will turn 74 on November 27th, has been dubbed the composer of a musica negativa. He cut his teeth on the music of the 1950s avant-garde, and his studies with the Italian communist composer, Luigi Nono, made a profound impression. Lachenmann has described the experience, without resentment, as an inquisition.
Lachenmann has also explained that his own music is “concerned with rigidly constructed denial, with the exclusion of what appears to me as listening expectations pre-formed by society”. He has earned himself a reputation for uncanny resourcefulness in pursuing unconventional modes of sound production from conventional instruments.
This programme, by soprano Sarah Leonard and pianist Rolf Hind, included the 1970 piano piece, Guero. Here, the pianist does fingernail glissandos along the cracks at the ends of the keys, or over the tops of them, like a conventional glissando with the sound of the actual notes removed, or plucks at the keys themselves, or works inside the piano, playing the ends of the strings near the tuning pins.
Echo Andante(1961-62) turns convention on its head by creating a work in which the endings of the notes matter as much as the beginnings. The key to the process is subtractive rather than additive. Lachenmann surprises by removing part of the sound picture to reveal what had been lurking, as it were, unsuspected in the background.
Got Lost(2008) was written for Sarah Leonard, who had requested a song cycle, and got instead a deconstruction of the very idea of song, with texts in three languages (German, English, Portuguese) intertwined, and individual words exploded into component sounds, which are then explored for their own sake. Some of the hissing and breathing vocalisations are even shared between pianist and singer.
This may all, of course, sound a bit abstract and, well, conventionally avant-garde. Lachenmann’s strength lies in the fact that he can subvert those conventions too. Leonard and Hind have this music in their blood, and they made the evening consistently engaging.
Their programme opened with a rather too vocally fruity performance of the two Op 14 songs by Arnold Schoenberg (Nono's father-in-law), and also included the angular, sensual, impassioned Djamila Boupachàmovement for solo soprano from Nono's Canti di vita e d'amore.
IPNM's New Sound Worlds series runs on consecutive Tuesdays until Dec 1. MICHAEL DERVAN
