Crash Ensemble's Christmas concert at the Project Arts Centre presented three Irish works showing composers in peak form. Jennifer Walshe's As mo cheann for voice, violin and stones explores a range of what would once have been rejected as musical sounds - grating, high-pitched vocal noises, contacts anywhere and everywhere between bow and fiddle, and stones rubbed between palms. She arrays them around moments of obscurely whispered text, as well as more suggestive utterings, words strangled, perhaps, in the moment of expression.
It's a work that's intimate, startling, and slightly disturbing. It was superbly handled by the composer and violinist Brona Cahill, and showed a theatrical assurance I haven't seen in a young Irish composer since the premiere of Gerald Barry's Things That Gain by Being Painted, over 20 years ago.
Roger Doyle's tape piece, The Idea and Its Shadow, takes a spoken text, musing on the nature of shadows, and proceeds by shadowing the inflections of the voice with music that's like a vividly-mobile, crystalline reflection of the rise and fall of the words. It's a mesmerising tour-de-force of sharp-witted musical shadowry, and also, for my money, quite the best thing Doyle has produced.
Ian Wilson's Abyssal, for bass clarinet and ensemble, may have been often light in texture and spare of notes, but it was also overwhelmingly heavy of message. Its spaced-out, falling lines seem to tell not only of sighing and of keening, but also of burdens not quite lifted, agonies not quite suppressed. Stark and emotionally direct in its exploitation of quarter tones, it represents a recent and extremely impressive dark turn in the composer's output.
Both the Doyle and Wilson were premieres, as was Fergus Johnston's Morrighan for baroque flute, harpsichord and live electronics, into which percolated too many of the stock gestures these instruments inspire. The two Eric Sweeney works also dealt in stock material, bare, minimalist patterning expressed with sugary synthetic tingle (Babylon) and more driven force (Pulsation). And Zack Browning's Double Shot for violin and keyboard seemed to traverse this composer's cartoon-chunky rhythmic terrain to no new advantage.
Ace Dutch bass clarinettist, Harry Sparnaay, did more than appear in the Wilson, offering the seductive melody of the closing solo from Klaas de Vries's opera, A King, Riding, and the intriguingly layered moto perpetuo of Guus Janssen's Sprezzatura. The programme also included a second tape piece integrating the worlds of voice and electronics with a sense of philosophical play, Futility 1964 by Herbert Brun.
