6 Bagatelles for Wind Quintet - Ligeti

Hebraische Balladen - Ulrich Leyendecker

die Steine - Peter Michael Hamel

Music for the Book of Kells; Wind Quintet-Sweeney's Wind-Cries; Trauerfelder-Gort an Bhroin - Frank Corcoran

Ligeti's Bagatelles of 1953 now seem to him to be "absolutely prehistoric". It is true that they sound rather like a baroque suite with touches of Stravinsky and Bartok, but they are eminently listenable to, have an individual voice and still sound fresh. The Daedalus Wind Quintet played them with bite and rhythmic vivacity.

The other work for wind quintet last Sunday in the Hugh Lane Gallery was Sweeney's Wind-Cries by Frank Corcoran who, born in Tipperary and resident in Hamburg, combines a knowledge of Irish culture, including the prehistoric, with a compostitional freedom acquired on the Continent. In his music it is as if the sounds of nature are transformed, but only half tamed, so there is a nervous balance between discipline and what sounds like licence.

Each of his works immediately creates an atmosphere, strong but impossible to particularise. Music for the Book of Kells opens with a solo for tubular bells, which may suggest the life of monasticism, but when the other members of the R.I.A.M. Percussion Ensemble join in, with much use of the bass drum, it seems that more elemental forces are brought into play. And when the piano enters, toward the end, played by the composer, it utters primitive sounds not at all like a piano.

Gort an Bhroin is perhaps the best embodiment of the recital's title: "Irish and German Tonal Landscapes". In it four percussionists make a threnody for the victims of Auschwitz. The work opens with tubular bells, but with the accompaniment of a snare drum. The two effects, rightly, are a world apart.

The Hebrew Ballads of Ulrich Leyendecker is based around seven poems, which in turn are based on the Old Testament, by Lasker-Schuler. Rachel Talbot (soprano) and David Adams (piano) brought the necessary seriousness to this unlikely union of emotional words and cooly intellectual music. Joined by John Finucane (clarinet), they also performed an astonishing setting, by Peter Michael Hamel, of two quatrains by Erich Fried. The Brechtian cogency of the text was expanded and elaborated in a highly decorated vocal line, with drumming figurations on the piano and melodic phrases on the clarinet; the words say more than lies on the surface, and this the music showed, overwhelmingly.