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