Corcoran: Symphonies 2-4. (Marco Polo). Corcoran: Mad Sweeney (Black Box)
Three symphonies and a clutch of smaller pieces from the Tipperary-born, Hamburg-resident Irish composer, Frank Corcoran. At 55, Corcoran is a composer whose vision is bleak and manner blunt. The compressed energy of his prose when he write about his music reflects the ambitious maelstrom of ideas and ambitions in the music itself: "Best work is exorcistic, laudatory, excavatory" . . . "Peroration is oration, celebration of synaesthetic power" . . . "It is a logic of chaos". He seems to want his listeners to feel prodded and provoked. The performances of the symphonies (NSO/Colman Pearce) carry a sense of strain not to the music's advantage. The mastery in the German performances of the smaller works illuminates with greater penetration.
- Michael Dervan
Buckley: Piano Music. Anthony Byrne (Black Box)
When he writes for symphony orchestra, Limerick-born John Buckley often sounds as if he's the man for whom the adjective coruscating must have been invented. In his piano music, ranging from Oileain of 1979 to Three Preludes of 1996, the sensibility which so lovingly creates cascades of glittery brilliance from a battery of percussion, expresses itself essentially through arabesque. It's like a horizontal streaming process that he chooses to run at different speeds, sometimes for sheer brilliance, slower to elaborate a point of repose, sometimes verticalised to yield chordal harmony. The sources of inspiration - nature, legends, poetry - don't yield a great expressive range in Anthony Byrne's diligent performances. It's Oileain and the simple Lullabies for Deirdre which stand out most distinctively.
- Michael Dervan
Trimble: Songs and Chamber Music (Marco Polo)
Joan Trimble, born in Enniskillen in 1915, is best known as a member of a famous piano duo with her sister Valerie. Although writing music was never her primary activity, her profile as a composer has been rising of late. The style is light and folksy enough for the line between original composition and arrangement to be thoroughly blurred, but the buoyant, sometimes frisky lyricism requires a style of highlighting - dim the background rather than project the foreground - that's not quite natural to today's performers. In the songs, baritone Joe Corbett and contralto Patricia Bardon often seem wide of the mark. The Dublin Piano Trio don't avoid inflating the Phantasy Trio, and it's Una Hunt and Roy Holmes in the two-piano music who come closest to the music's elusive spirit.
- Michael Dervan