The Gerald Barry Festival, which runs from Wednesday until tomorrow week, serves a dual function. It provides a retrospective of the composer's work and gives Irish music-lovers an opportunity to catch up with more recent pieces, unheard in Ireland until now. At the one end, there are some of Barry's earliest pieces, the hugely successful and very amusing Things That Gain by Being Painted and a series of three fairy-tale theatre pieces (Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella). At the other, are major orchestral works of the 1990s (The Road, The Conquest of Ireland) and two of his latest pieces, 1998 for violin and piano, and Wiener Blut, arriving, just after its Aldeburgh Festival premiere, courtesy of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. The performers include Japanese pianist Noriko Kawai (right), who's playing the complete solo piano music, and some of the two-piano music with Pavel Nersessian, the NSO under Robert Houlihan and the National Chamber Choir under Simon Joly.
