Irish Times 09/06/09 (excerpt)

Concorde

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Alejandro Castaños – Angulos. Judith Ring – Whispering the Turmoil Down. Lundquist – Duell. Stephen
Gardner – klezmeria. Judith Ring – Within an Egg of Space.

In this free afternoon concert, contemporary music ensemble Concorde presented first performances of new works it commissioned from Irish composers Stephen Gardner and Judith Ring.

Ring’s Within an Egg of Space is for flute, clarinet, piano, accordion, violin and cello. There is also a part fortape, pre-recorded by Ring in collaboration with Concorde.

It was often difficult to distinguish live from recorded sound. Rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that this didn’t matter, that such aural distinctions were as irrelevant here as detecting which horn plays the third of the chord in a Tchaikovsky symphony. What mattered was the cake and not the ingredients. Ring’s cake offers an inviting sound-world of curious instrumental colours, including what may be bird calls and small animal sounds, subtly backdropped by judicious stroking and striking of the piano strings from inside the lid. And it’s not merely a sound-world, but a work with structure, featuring two main high points which finally fade to nothing except a strong sense of completeness.

Concorde also reprised Ring’s 2007 Whispering the Turmoil Down in which, by contrast, the roles of the solo bass clarinet and its pre-recorded self are deliberately clear-cut. The live instrument plays a thoughtful, meandering song to a taped accompaniment of exquisite chimes and temple gongs somehow, magically, extracted from the bass clarinet’s hardy character.

MICHAEL DUNGAN

IRISH TIMES 23/04/09 (excerpt)

Ergodos Festival
NCH, Dublin

The Ergodos Festival is new, but not quite. This celebration of new music used to be called the Printing House Festival of New Music, and was held in the Printing House of TCD. Under its new name, it has expanded from a weekend to eight days, and it’s migrated to the National Concert Hall and venues further afield.

Monday offered a programme curated by Judith Ring, essentially creating a portrait concert framed by two of her tape works, and including pieces and improvisations by friends and colleagues.

Ring is a composer working in the domain of electro-acoustic music who has chosen to be overt about the limitations in her selection and processing of material. Her Mouthpiece is an elaborate tapestry woven out of recordings of the real-life, unprocessed voice of mezzo soprano Natasha Lohan. It’s presented as a kind of music without disguise, and the thrall it exerts stems in large part from the unmistakable nature of its material. The almost painful-sounding, impossibly high notes that Lohan reaches up to, the in-the-mouth closeness of some of the sounds (worked up to a kind of choral effect), the concerted glissando effects, were all marshalled in a way that seemed at once straightforward and imaginative.

Ring’s Metallurgy took a similar tack with exploratory percussion recordings by Beau Stocker.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Concorde
18/11/07
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Michael Dungan

This free concert by the contemporary music ensemble Concorde was
ticking along very nicely when the premiere of a new piece by Irish
composer Judith Ring suddenly elevated the whole occasion to something
rather special.

Whispering the Turmoil Down illustrates Ring's new focus within the
electronic music milieu where she has already enjoyed great success.

Whereas her award-winning Accumulation (2000) achieved a thrilling,
galactic kind of vastness by electronically manipulating sounds
recorded from domestic appliances, the new piece operates within the
constraint of a single instrument, both live and pre-recorded on tape
but without processing.

The instrument is the bass clarinet. It was the segment on tape in
particular that opened a window into Ring's remarkable artistic
intuition. For while the bass clarinet is more generally associated
with robust and very deep notes, in Ring's hands the layering of quiet
long notes and multiphonics produced a surprisingly exquisite and
gentle sound-world full of delicate gongs and crystalline, bell-like
sonorities. Against this beautiful backdrop the live instrument seemed
an almost human voice narrating a wordless story. Paul Roe, for whom
the piece was written, gave a magical performance, both live and on
tape.

The other pieces featured musicians I hadn't heard playing with
Concorde before. Cellist Martin Johnson gave a nicely shaped account
of the central solo that was the high point of Nino Diaz's quick-slow
ensemble piece Noiabr. Violinist Brona Fitzgerald featured in short,
lively pieces by Pedro Pardo - Humoresque - and Ariel Hernandez, whose
Acollaradas placed her in energetic and dance-driven dialogue with
accordion-player Dermot Dunne.

The Two Soliloquies for clarinet, violin, cello, accordion and piano
were from a set of seven written by Barcelona-born Joaquim Homs at the
time of his wife's death in 1972. With mostly restrained expression
they explored emotions ranging between grief, distress, and rage.

The concert closed with an engaging and well-crafted bit of
contemporary programme music by Grainne Mulvey. Her Agglomeration is a
musical response to the idea of particles gradually joining and
combining, leading ultimately to the formation of vast bodies such as
stars. The judicious use of advanced techniques such as multiphonics
and the grinding of strings nicely evoked the early stages of the
process, which expanded to include string glissandi and deep rumblings
on the bass clarinet and accordion. These created a strong sense of
gigantic growth and mass. Not bad for a piece of chamber music.