Castletown House, Co Kildare
FORTY YEARS ago the Palladian splendour of Castletown House provided the setting for the establishment of what’s now the KBC Music in Great Irish Houses Festival. Three years ago it became the home of a new festival, the Castletown Concerts, with Barry Douglas’s chamber orchestra, Camerata Ireland, as its ensemble in residence.
The high point of this year’s Castletown Concerts, however, was not in Castletown at all. It took place in the chapel of NUI Maynooth, where the music-making lasted a bare 15 minutes.
The festival had invited Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki to be a guest, and the Maynooth performances were tied in to the conferring of an honorary doctorate on the composer.
Penderecki himself conducted his great early success, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshimafor 52 strings, first heard in 1961, and the Benedictusfor choir, of 1993.
The two are so different they might easily be taken for the work of different composers. The Threnodyis very much in the avant-garde mode of its time.
It imitates the unorthodox sounds and transformational processes that were being opened up by the electronic studio — screeching, rasping, snapping sounds, the sliding movement of unstable masses of tone, a dynamic pointillism that creates a sonic semblance of the shifting patterns of flocks of birds in the sky, and clouds of string tone so dense they are like powerful breaths of darkness.
The actual score, too, is unusual. The notation is often graphic, and the piece is mapped out in sections timed in seconds rather than with conventional bar-lines. In fact, the original title was just a duration, 8'37", before Penderecki changed it to Threnody.
The Threnodyis not the first orchestral piece to emulate the effects of the electronic studio. Xenakis had done that in Metastaseisand Pithopraktayears earlier. But Penderecki's title functions as an opening into the music rather than a likely barrier, as Xenakis's titles do. The shock and awe aspect of the avant-garde vernacular marries perfectly with the apocalyptic associations and emotional implications of the title.
Sunday’s orchestra was made up of students from NUI Maynooth, TCD, the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, the RIAM, UCD, and members of the Ulster Youth Orchestra and the Co Kildare Orchestra, with a small professional stiffening. Penderecki’s purposefully edgy conducting made every restless, unsettling moment tell.
The Benedictus, sung by the NUI Maynooth Chamber Choir, presented sounds that might have been from an altogether more traditional, sonically unchallenging era. The Maynooth singers delivered it with unfailing command of gesture and beauty of tone.
The festival included four other works by Penderecki, two of which the composer conducted Camerata Ireland in. He presented the baroque pastiche of Three Pieces in the Old Stylein burnished string tone.
The Capricciofor oboe (Emmet Byrne) and 11 strings, of 1965, is a frenetic mini concerto, which, in spite of Penderecki's presence, came across as having its hair combed and its wings clipped.
The largest of the Penderecki pieces was the 30-minute Sextet, a millennial commission for the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna that's scored for clarinet (Michel Lethiec), horn (Frank Lloyd), violin (Erika Raum), viola (Nathan Braude), cello (Henri Demarquette), piano (Barry Douglas).
The first movement opens with an obsession with repeated notes, and develops in ways that suggest a garrulous, sometimes giddy narrative. But the obsession never really lifts. Even in the more ruminative second movement, the motivic tightness keeps the music anchored, in spite of the often free-flowing polyphonic nature of the writing.
Saturday’s performance was remarkable for the phenomenal strength of Lloyd’s horn-playing, whether onstage or, in the piece’s most theatrical gesture, behind the scenes.
Lethiec also played the 1987 Prelude for Solo Clarinet, a short, highly effective piece that blends keening falls with high virtuosity.
It was interesting in the opening concert to hear the different sound worlds presented by Penderecki’s conducting and that of Barry Douglas. Douglas is a high-energy musician, whether conducting or playing — he did both in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K 414.
His conducting rarely delivers playing of a smooth finish. The price of the energy is the musical equivalent of hair with split ends — intonation and ensemble suffer under the pressure of the journey to the edge. And he is apt to play Mozart with a lot more energy than the music needs or can comfortably handle.
In his solo piano recital he kept his listeners on the edge of their seats, steering an almost relentlessly linear path through Schumann's Sonata in F sharp minor, trading harmonic interest for momentum. The same approach yielded better results in Chopin's Nocturnein E flat, Op. 55 No. 2, than it did in the Polonaise in C minor, Op. 40 No. 2. But the highlight was undoubtedly the no-holds-barred account of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, played in a fearless adrenaline-rich spirit.
Douglas favoured volume levels that would have thrilled anyone in the back row at Carnegie Hall. In the confines of Castletown House the effect was exhilarating.
In the festival's other piano recital, 22-year-old Alexej Gorlatch sounded like a refined elder statesman to Douglas's firebrand. In Gorlatch's Schumann — the Fantasiestücke, Op. 12 — the shifts and tints of the harmonic colouring were explored with painstakingly touching thoroughness.
