LCMS, Dundalk 2025
Bashō, Eight Pieces for Four Guitars, Svatý Kryštof - Martin Smolka
Enigma I, II, III, IV, VI - Beat Furrer
The Aleph Guitar Quartet, Daisy Press, Daan Vandewalle, Apartment House, Francesca Fargion, Chamber Choir Ireland, Nils Schweckendiek
Dundalk - 13th and 14th June 2025
As always, the Louth Contemporary Music Society managed to find a suitable title and theme for their annual festival of new music that, despite the remarkable variety of works performed, manages to gather everything neatly under a wide umbrella. More than that, Echoes also presents an interesting way to approach and consider the collection of the individual works in relation to each other and their place within that broad family of 'new music'. Despite the remarkable variety of the each of the works and the festival as a whole, this year's theme gave each of them a context and fresh perspective. Not to mention the relevance of the theme in as far as how the regular venues for the festival all provide their own unique and important sound resonance.
Echoes, in relation to the music of the 2025 festival's primary guest Bernhard Lang performed here, is perfectly fitting in terms of how those works often have echoes of music from the past and thrive on repetition. New music doesn't exist in a vacuum, but reflects and echoes our own responses, our own experiences of music in an individual way. New music in as far as Lang is concerned is not to ignore, disparage or destroy traditional music forms of the past but rather - in such series as his Monadologie works - he is continually looking for ways to keep the history of music alive and responsive to new ideas. In these works, the composer takes elements of great works, runs them through a computer, cuts, pastes and loops and presents them in a new context. That makes it sound like a technical exercise, creating what Lang describes as a 'meta-composition' - in popular music it might be called 'a remix' - but in practice and in performance it expands the range of music, instruments and technology in a fascinating way that is relevant and contemporary.
There was no technology employed, for example, in the opening Friday evening concert performance at the An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk of 8-4-8 - Silver Light and Cold Trip. The first piece, performed by the Aleph Guitar Quartet is not actually part of the Monadologie meta-compositions but rather employs another method in his GAME series that allows an element of openness, randomness, variability and unpredictability into the composition. The four musicians playing amplified acoustic guitars pre-select their individual parts from a set of cards to produce a piece that takes on a random and original form. When played together, using a remarkable variety of techniques and textures including microtonal tuning and extended techniques; picking, strumming, rubbing, tapping and bottleneck sliding; the individual parts come together in unexpected ways, and sometimes planned ones. There seem to be infinite possibilities to this kind of approach.
While that unpredictability and variety is constantly providing surprises, what isn't often considered is the visual side of performance, which is a benefit that comes with seeing such material played at the LCMS and other festivals of this kind. There is a tremendous advantage is not just hearing the music live and spacially separated in a suitable environment, but it aids engagement to be able to see what each guitarist is playing, how it works with the other parts and how it contributes to the whole.
In my limited experience of Bernhard Lang's work, mainly from his opera work like Re:igen, I had an impression of him as being a playful and irreverent composer. Playful maybe, but on the basis of 8-4-8 and his other works performed in this festival, clearly not irreverent. You could be mistaken for thinking that of Cold Trip, which you could describe as a remixed distillation of Schubert's Winterreisse. There's a purity in that work that surely needs no distillation, but at the same time, this 200 year old song cycle doesn't need to remain preserved in amber or indeed forever frozen in time. Its qualities have been influential throughout musical history, in classical, folk and pop music, and Lang's piece for four guitars and singer basically acknowledges that. It's all the more apparent when seen performed here by The Aleph Guitar Quartet with soprano Daisy Press in the beautifully lit and immaculate sound environment of the stage at the An Táin Arts Centre.
Lang's Cold Trip (Part 1) emphasises and highlights the nature or character of Schubert's setting of the Wilhelm Müller poem, with a looped repetition of key words, "frozen", "tear drops", "snow", "deep sorrows", "my heart is frozen". What is different is that in Lang's version, this seems less melancholy and - let's face it - self-pitying is, as sung by Daisy Press, it takes on a wider range of human expression, finding playfulness, humour and even a cold sensual quality in the rhythms and the imagery, at times recalling the intense cabaret melodrama of Pierrot Lunaire. Although the Aleph Guitar Quartet play with the same complexity of techniques found in the 8-4-8, they also support this exploration, bringing out pop-like melodies that indeed reflect Winterreise’s influence on modern (self-pitying) soul balladeers. Cold Trip doesn't treat Schubert at all irreverently, it doesn't desecrate Winterreisse, but rather explores it with a view to the resonances of the work that still echo throughout the years.
On Saturday the second full day of the festival, Lang could be seen to take a similar approach to Chopin's Études in Monadologie XXXVI, demonstrating a foundation of piano playing learning Chopin can continue to be another source of wonder. The twelves pieces vary in how close they keep to the original to Chopin's etudes, Lang again taking elements and repeating them, sometimes letting them take off in different directions. In the resonant acoustics of the St Nicholas Church of Ireland, pianist Daan Vandewalle dived deeply into the pieces, exploring the full range of tempos and range of sounds on offer from pianissimo to fortissimo. Requiring no extended reaching into piano extended techniques and no electronics, Lang's reinterpretations felt natural and organic, Vandewalle making them sound fresh and vibrant, showing that they still have riches to offer.
The Aleph Guitar Quartet and Daisy Press were back at the Chapel at St. Vincent's Secondary School, a venue typically used by the LCMS for very slow, quiet music that often has a spiritual nature. That might not have been the intention of Bashō and Eight Pieces for Four Guitars composed by Martin Smolka for the Quartet, but there was certainly room for quiet contemplation in the venue and the music, and a third piece Svatý Kryštof - a new commission for the festival alluding to the St Christopher on the Charles Bridge in Prague, was appropriate for the location. Introducing the concert Smolka preferred to let the works speak for themselves and proposed their main objective being to seek to bring beauty back into music. It was an afternoon of quiet music that need to be listened to intently and in the location of St Vincent's that wasn't difficult. The acoustic guitar arrangements rarely developed into a flow, relying rather on a single note or two played round-robin fashion by each guitarist. This had the effect of opening up the songs, spacial positioning and visuals again enriching the experience, inviting the listener to focus on the delicacy of the playing and revel in the beauty of each and every note and microtone. This also provided ample room for the voice of Daisy Press to bring the poetry of Bashō to the setting with an unaccompanied delivery of beautiful precision for Svatý Kryštof, the resonance of the voice and the words carrying through.
As if genre and historical music frontiers were not already breached, the third show of the day added some opposing push from the direction of popular music into 'new music'. Not that the music of Nico, John Cale and the Velvet Underground stable are easily categorised themselves. The early evening LCMS show at The Spirit Store has come to play that role in the festival; not so much that of a refresher or a breathing space from the often intense music and high concentration performances elsewhere - although it serves that purpose too - but rather one that offers a sideways perspective that has an indefinable influence on the works surrounding it. That's something that Apartment House are well used to and the idea of presenting a complete reworking of Nico’s debut album The Marble Index is an interesting one. The arrangement by Kerry Young for string quartet, Young taking the piano and electronics and singer Francesca Fargion singing the songs with a folk-inflection, offered a new fresh perspective on the other pieces in the festival as well as on Nico's album itself. On more than one occasion references to "frozen warnings" and "roses growing in the snow" reminded me of Winterreise or even Lang's Cold Trip. Although such connections are unintentional (I presume), they are nonetheless evidence of adventurous programming throwing up unexpected references and resonances. Or indeed Echoes.
The final evening concert of an LCMS festival back at the church of St Nicholas is often a selection of choral works often proves to be the ideal way to finish off the festival. The selection here for Echoes sung by Chamber Choir Ireland was wonderfully varied, showing the huge range of possibilities and approaches to choral music. Sarah Davachi's new commission Songs of the Smile's Fig established a distinct meditative mood in a steady flow of ethereal voices over its three parts that held a drone-like undercurrent for the words of surrealist André Breton to weave strange imagery. The words themselves could hardly be distinguished in this flow, but were perhaps less important than the mood they evoked. It was almost the opposite with Kevin Volans' Glosa a lo Divino, where the Spanish language text of the 16th century poet San Juan de la Cruz could be clearly followed in the see-saw up-and-down staccato rhythm dwelling on each syllable of every word with only the occasional overlay of running lines the latter verse. It does allow the beauty of the writing to be heard and contemplated.
In between those two rather more sedate pieces, five of the seven Enigmas (I, II, III, IV, VI) composed by Beat Furrer on 'prophesies' written by Leonardo da Vinci were completely and thrillingly in an otherworld of their own. The shifting arrangements and repositioning of the singers give the pieces an extraordinary power and dynamic range of sometimes eardrum battering force that felt truly apocalyptic without every falling into predictable choral voicings or Carl Orff Carmina Burana territory. I can see why however, particularly in these times, the festival would not want their audience - one that seems to grow year upon year - to leave with admonitions of dread and doom ("It will come out of dark and gloomy caves/and whoever does not support it will meet with sudden and terrible death") ringing in their ears. Kevin Volans' Glosa a lo Divino, with its beautiful sentiments, provided the right note to end with the echoes of another successful LCMS festival still resounding as you made your way home.
External links: Louth Contemporary Music Society