................................... Eric Tanguy................................... Horatiu Radulescu de la Vierge ................ MessiaenReneHoratiu Radulescu.............................. Frederic Rzewski festival programme put together by Queen's University composer in residence James Clarke. In the past, Sonorities has called itself a festival of "20th century music". This year the well worn opt out (which could embrace Ravel and Nielsen as easily as Ives and Schoenberg) has been dropped, and the label changed to "contemporary music".
More importantly, Clarke has has chosen to concentrate on music that is little known and largely unheard in this part of the world.
Friday's opening recital by the German pianist Ortwin Sturmer gave a strongly projected introduction to what's in store music which engages with politics and philosophy, and struggles to redefine the boundaries of the possible.
The most immediately striking of the unfamiliar pieces in the programme were the two sonatas by the Romanian, Horatiu Radulescu, both of which were commissioned by Sturmer. Radulescu, now in his mid 50s, is labelled a "spectralist", and in these two piano pieces, which engage. with Romanian folk music the spectral concerns materialise through high lying filigree expressed into the halo of resonance of sounds extruded with unusual force at the tower end of the keyboard.
The two studies by a French pupil of Radulescu, Eric Tan guy (born 1968), showed a preoccupation with what you might call a counterpoint of layers. The three pieces by Zurich born Renew Wohlhauser (born 1954), a pupil of Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough, were tantalisingly short, almost cryptic by comparison with the altogether more meandering opening pieces by Ernst Helmuth Flammer (born 1949).
In this concert the vivid patterning of American Frederic Rzewski's Piano Pie cc No. 4 was like a waft of air from an other world, and the inclusion of Messiaen's Premier Communion de la Vierge offered evidence that the extremes of the playing had to do with the style, of the player a well as the music he was playing.
