Siobhán Long reviews Ní Chasadaigh, Ó Lionáird at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Andrew Johnstone reveiews the Gala Concert the the NCH in Dublin
Ní Chasadaigh, Ó Lionáird, St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin
Celebrating the historical ties between harper and poet, the opening concert of the World Harp Congress in St Patrick's Cathedral was a stately, considered affair. With six harpers (all female), the gathering reinforced popular conceptions of the harp as a curiously female instrument. Seamus Heaney was an ideal choice, his poems - including St Kevin And The Blackbird and At The Wellhead - teasing out the subtleties of the old Irish repertoire with ease.
Juxtaposing the early Irish harp with its more contemporary cousin and the concert harp, and placing all three in the heady environs of St Patrick's Cathedral was an inspired decision by the organisers. With an audience made up equally of congress afficionados and ordinary punters, this judicious mix of old and new was enough to lure the most resistant listener into the fold.
Siobhán Armstrong's reading of Ruaidhrí Dall Ó Catháin's seminal Tabhair Dom Do Lámh (Give Me Your Hand) on the early Irish harp was an apt reminder of the aural similarities between this particular generation of harp and the harpsichord, and conjured a time long gone with a welcome informality that was perfectly countered by the haughtiness of Carolan's Fanny Power, played by Áine Ní Dhubhghaill on the Irish harp.
The second of four sets lagged somewhat, its nine selected tunes jostling for position amid the melée, but Iarla Ó Lionáird's superb reading of Carolan's Eleanor Plunkett raised the temperature perceptibly, his crystalline tone enveloping the tale in a swathe of velveteen, while his later contribution of Aisling Gheal was a timely reminder of his singular talent as his voice soared and swooped with the effortlessness only enjoyed by the truly gifted.
Gráinne Hambly's Patsy Tuohey's/Maud Miller, both traditional tunes, raised the bar further, her feather-light touch on the Irish harp offering an ideal counterpoint to Máire Ní Chasadaigh's The Humours Of Ballyloughlin. Ellen Cranitch lent wood flute in small but perfectly-formed measure, and her all-too-brief solo on The Old Brown Slipper reinforced the kinship between strings and wood that makes harp and flute such comfortable bedfellows. Seamus Heaney's choice of his translation of Aodhaghán Ó Rathaille's The Glamoured Girl as the opener to the third set offered a perfectly-pitched foil: Caoineadh Luimní.
Although at times the repertoire flagged (a result of over-enthusiastic programming, I'd guess), the inclusion of John Field's Nocturne No. 5 in B Flat and Brian Boydell's A Pack Of Fancies For A Travelling Harper pulled the proceedings left-field, challenging the audience rather than simply basting them in the delights of Carolan. An exceptional night of music. - Siobhán Long
Gala Concert, NCH, Dublin
Six soloists and their harps successively took the stage in this gala concert as part of the ninth World Harp Congress. The music was chiefly contemporary, and much of it included other instruments.
Three solos played in tribute to the late Deane Sherman, a former vice-president of the congress, were among the most appealing items. Representing Portugal and the US, Mario Falcao played Sergiu Natra's Prayer, a sultry, Waltonesque impression with sophisticated blue-note harmonies. British harpist David Watkins followed with his own gentle cavatina In Memoriam, and Italy's Elena Zaniboni gave a neatly-layered and paragraphed account of Debussy's Arabesque No 1.
France's Ensemble Alternance demonstrated two recent works for the flute-viola-harp combination inaugurated by Debussy. It sounded as exotic as ever in the self-consciously Debussian Trois Nocturnes by Philippe Hersant, who wisely let each instrument go its own idiomatic way, unencumbered by motivic interplay.
Klaus Huber's L'âge de notre Ombre, in contrast, made perversely non-idiomatic use of the resources. Its requirement of retuning the harp to a non-diatonic scale created expectations of iconoclasm or piquancy that were utterly frustrated in the musical wasteland that ensued.
Abstraction of a much more persuasive kind came in Gennem Torne by Per Norgård, whose expertise in harp writing was impressively matched by Danish executant Tine Rehling. The series of cadenzas forming the greater part of this piece was punctuated by contributions from flute, clarinet and string quartet played by Dublin musicians under Denmark-based conductor Kaisa Roose.
The quartet returned to play a scaled-down accompaniment to Mozart's Concerto in C K415, whose solo piano part was performed on the harp by Emily Mitchell from the US. Though her adaptation necessarily sacrificed a degree of naturalness to the instrument's technical limitations, it remained astonishingly faithful to the original text. - Andrew Johnstone
• World Harp Congress runs until Sunday
