Irish Times writers review the Ninth World Harp Congress Concerts at the NCH in Dublin and the Wallfisch and ConTempo String Quartet at the Galway Arts Festival.
Ninth World Harp Congress Concerts
NCH Dublin
Martin Adams
Anyone writing for harp has a choice similar to that faced by composers for guitar. Do you or do you not work within traditions of composition and playing that have turned the instrument's inherent limitations into shining virtues? The various ways in which composers addressed this conundrum proved to be one of the most interesting aspects of the Ninth World Harp Congress concerts I attended on Wednesday and Thursday.
In the Wednesday-morning coffee concert, James Wilson's Serenade Op. 64 (2002) showed one way of meeting the challenge. The players - harpist Geraldine O'Doherty, violinist Alan Smale, and the work's dedicatee, cellist Moya O'Grady - captured Wilson's balanced blend of almost-French elegance, and modernizing harmony.
John Buckley's endless the white clouds . . . for solo harp was commissioned by the congress, and was engagingly played by Geraldine O'Doherty. It manages to turn away from evident stylistic precedents while acknowledging what the instrument does best. This well-crafted, single-movement work has the character of an extended introduction - always leading onward, hinting at arrival.
Thursday night's concert at the National Concert Hall featured the Ulster Orchestra and its principal conductor, Takuo Yuasa, on strong form in harp concertos from England, Ireland and Wales. The work that was most-accepting of the concert harp's traditions was William Alwyn's Lyra angelica> for harp and strings. In this immaculately crafted piece, echoes of English pastoralism, French impressionism and early Britten coexist a little too comfortably. Written in 1954 for Sidonie Goossens, the solo part was given suitably perfect treatment by Lucy Wakeford.
The Harp Concerto by Ireland's Gerard Victory was written just 17 years after the Alwyn, but is much more adventurous. Despite its occasional garrulity, it proved engaging, thanks partly to Caitríona Yeats's energetic and unapologetic solo playing.
In his concerto for two harps, Over the Stone the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins accepts the challenges of writing for harp, pokes gentle fun at them, and turns the rights and wrongs of harp techniques into a little drama.
Elinor Jenkins and Catrin Finch spirited playing gave this concert a rousing conclusion. Composers can do that sort of thing only so often and so much. If I had to put my money on the directions that offer the most potential for the harp, one would be represented by Thursday's coffee concert for harps and electronics. The work for six electro-acoustic harps, Secret Life of Bees, by the American, Yugoslav-born composer Victoria Jordanova, was over-long for its material. However, its exploration of sonorous possibility was fascinating. New things were to be heard in Acuerdos por diferencia by Javier Álvarez and in Stephen Andrew Taylor's Nebulae, both of which blended live playing with pre-recorded sound. However, this concert's most consistently intriguing piece was another congress commission, Psallo, by Ireland's Michael Alcorn. Harp, electronics and vocal sounds from the player are woven tightly together. The instrument's traditions are respected, but it has become a resource for a much wider range of possibilities.
Wallfisch, ConTempo String Quartet
Galway Arts Festival
Michael Dervan
Enescu - Piano Sonata Op 24 No 1. String Quartet No 2.
Some of the music of Romania's greatest composer George Enescu (1881-1955) seems to deny performers and listeners alike the comforts of clear perspectives. Much of Enescu's work stood apart from the music of its time when it was new, and it still has an individuality amounting almost to idiosyncrasy which makes it difficult to categorise.
"Polyphony is the essential principle of my musical language," he once declared. "I'm not a person for pretty successions of chords. I have a horror of everything which stagnates. However short it is, a piece deserves to be called a musical composition only if it has a line, a melody, or, even better, melodies superimposed on one another."
The progress of discourse in Enescu's music has elements of unpredictability which even the most persistent and insightful of performers find difficult to tame.
The veteran Romanian pianist Lory Wallfisch, who preceded her performance of the composer's First Piano Sonata in Galway on Thursday with a general introduction to his life and music, played the piece as if entranced, caught up in the mysteries of a mystical dream in which the rapture of the moment mostly commanded greater attention than any longer spans of self-sustaining logic.
Her playing on the small grand piano provided was sensually delicate, the sharpest outlines paradoxically emerging in the impressionistically slow closing movement, where echoes of Ravel were clearly discernible.
The members of the ConTempo Quartet, themselves Romanian, tackled their countryman's Second String Quartet, another work of shifting rhythmic sands, of shapes that don't quite coalesce before they disappear into the ether.
The music, which occupied the composer for some 30 years, is at once fascinating and frustrating, like an intriguing vision caught in the corner of your eye that no amount of head-turning or re-focusing can bring into sharp view. The effect is to give it an elusive, stylistically timeless quality, which, I suspect, it also had when, in the early 1950s, it was first visited on a musical world that was just about to witness the revolution of total serialism.
