LCMS, Dundalk 2026
Litanei - Beat Furrer
Coming Together - Frederic Rzewski
String Trio - Jürg Frey
in mia vita da vuolp - Beat Furrer
Lotófagos - Beat Furrer
Prophezeiungen - Beat Furrer
U.S. Highball - Harry Partch
Dundalk - 19th and 20th June 2026
The persistent rain stopped and the skies cleared a few hours before the opening evening concert of the first day of the 2026 Louth Contemporary Music Society festival. Now in its 20th year, this year's programme was entitled Coming Together and the LCMS's midsummer celebration of new music brought together many regular attendees under the June sun in Dundalk, Co. Louth, including the seagulls who added their customary background lament. The unique conditions of this setting - something that makes this festival of new music unlike any other - were reflected in the programming for the opening concert at St. Nicholas' Church of three pieces that alone almost constitute a mini-festival. It certainly pointed to the variety and the adventurous direction that the festival would take the in the following full day of concerts; a format that is characteristic of the festival, the programme constantly surprising and delighting, yet retaining a clear coherent unity, never feeling like it is just a collection of pieces thrown randomly together.
The principal guest composer this year was Swiss-born Austrian composer Beat Furrer who has such a variety of work that you could build a festival around his compositions work alone. Furrer, in my opinion (as principally an opera reviewer) excels in vocal pieces and while we didn't get one of his full scale operas at the LCMS festival, the works chosen for the programme proved to be extraordinarily rich in musical, lyrical and even dramatic content. Furrer's astonishing choral work Enigmas featured in last year's festival Echoes, and the qualities of that work were reflected in the two pieces for solo voices on the opening night. Based on a work by the Italian poet Dino Campania (1885-1932), Canti della tenebra for contralto and piano (Cornelia Sonnleitner the contralto, Mary Dullea on piano) immediately grabbed your attention, the mood of the piece melancholic and reflective of someone unmoored on a journey. The musical setting reflected and deepened the meaning - something that would be a feature of the rest of the festival selections - drawing you in and inviting you to feel and connect with the underlying sentiments.
Furrer also gifted us with a remarkable new piece commissioned by LCMS, Litanei for soprano, clarinet & string quartet. It was perhaps not so easy to relate to the emotional content, but the effect of the manner in which the fragments of the poems were assembled and presented was extraordinary. Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-77) and Gaspara Stampa (1523-54) are separated by centuries and language but weaved together their words don't so much intensify their respective agony as much as support each other through the pain. Furrer conducted the ensemble with a very tight rein through the precise, short sharp jagged expressions of intense hurt fired out in the voice and in the instruments ("crushed… skewered…between the pages of the book…reality murdered") were wreathed in short gaps of silence to let them resonate, before building in intensity. Elina Viluma-Helling unveiled some stark emotional trauma that you might not want to feel so viscerally, but for the listener - for this one anyway - it was utterly gripping. You could feel yourself tensing, but somehow the musical development managed to find a release for all the pent up emotions across its short but intense journey. Utterly breathtaking.
In a way that is typical of the programming - and reflected at greater length across Day 2 - Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together couldn't have been more different in its musical treatment and yet in a way it was complementary to the Furrer pieces and even an ideal way of further coming down from them. The work is based on a letter written in 1971 by Sam Melville, a prisoner in Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, in the same year that Melville was later involved in the prison riots demanding basic human rights that saw forty-three inmates and guards killed, including Melville himself. Rzewski's setting of the words is a celebrated piece, very much in the minimalist tradition of Terry Riley’s In C, but it has features that also have echoes to other works seen at the LCMS in previous years such as Gavin Briers' Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet and Robert Ashley in the Lovely Music programme, using conversational or found text with an enigmatic expression that is explored through rhythmic propulsion and repetition.
As delivered by Daisy Press and the ensemble, Rzewski’s Coming Together was just as fascinating and thoughtful the compelling exploration of words in the Furrer pieces, but approached from a totally different angle. Like In C the instruments are not predetermined, but the rising and falling interactive dynamic is an essential scored element and Daisy Press was expressive in exploring the words and communicative in how she put them across, not least in the enigmatic repetition of the line "I think the combination of age and the greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time." Giving this year's festival its title, there are plenty of other opportunities in the remaining Day 2 programme to reflect on that idea of a "greater coming together", but the programme on the opening night concert alone provided a rich musical assemblage of its own.
In as much as any musical piece is - and it was the only purely musical piece in this year's programme - Jürg Frey’s String Trio is a work that locates you in space and time: slowness of time, each note measured out, the performance venue playing a vital role in the uniqueness of the piece. This would sound and feel quite different in Frey's home place of inspiration in the Swiss Alps, it might have sounded different indeed even in Dundalk in another venue like the chapel of St Vincent's but in the former jail of the Oriel Centre, it had perhaps a more melancholy and reflective tone. You could even see a kind of 'coming together' forming already in the festival's programming, the previous evening ending with a piece that was informed by the writing of a prisoner in a jail adding an unexpected resonance to work. Rather than a lament however, it felt more like welcoming music, drawing you and the audience in back together and, at a demanding 47 minutes long, prepping you for the day ahead. Ultimately however the String Trio was rewarding in its slow development and progression, the subtle brush of a bow, the holding on a sustained note, the off-centre changes and interactions of Darragh Morgan (violin), Danusha Waskiewicz (viola) and Jakob Kullberg (cello), and the intimacy and acoustics of the Dundalk Gaol enough to hold you rapt and attentive.
In his introduction to his three pieces performed at St Vincent's Chapel, in mia vita da vuolp (in my life as a wolf, 2019), Lotófagos (The Lotus Eaters, 2006) and Prophezeiungen (Prophesies, 2023), Beat Furrer talked about voice, language, the inspiration of the poems that they are written around, and how there is a needing to feel them deeply in order to write music for them. The pieces all accordingly have different combinations of singer and instrumentation; in mia vita da vuolp for soprano and baritone saxophone, Lotófagos for soprano and double bass, Prophezeiungen for alto, contrabass clarinet and accordion. Two of the pieces have opera connections, Lotófagos incorporated into the Furrer opera Wüstenbuch (2010), Prophezeiungen written in preparation for the opera Das grosse Feuer (2025), and performed by musicians and singers of the astonishingly virtuosic Cantando Admont vocal ensemble they were accordingly fully dramatic in expression, from the lowest of whispers to the most piercing of shrieks, from rapid recital of text to slowest drawing out of words.
Testing voice and instruments to their limits, soprano Elina Viluma-Helling and baritone saxophonist Gerald Preinfalk swooped and howled though in mia vita da vuolp; double bass player Nikolaus Feinig was bent over at a 90° angle for most of the 10 minutes of high bass notes of Lotófagos in a battle to draw full expression out of the struggle to overcome the loss of memory in the setting of the Spanish text scored in an dauntingly challenging range that was met by soprano Giulia Zaniboni. The combination of voice and instruments of these two pieces produced some incredible sound worlds, but the most striking and unusual was evident in Prophezeiungen, the contrabass clarinet of Marco Sala and accordion of Krassimir Sterev creating unearthly sounds that wove through the astonishing vocal delivery of alto Helena Sorokina. It was a charged pin you back into your pew performance of all three pieces, finding incredible musicality even at the most extreme limits of sound, voice and music, but always in service to the vivid imagery of the texts.
Ostensibly having little in common with the other concerts, Harry Partch fits into this programme much more than you would think, which is of course one of the wonders of the programming of the LCMS, which always looks for something a little more outside the box for its event at the Spirit Store venue. Creating his own self- made custom instruments, composing in just intonation, new music doesn't get much more experimental than the truly unique and inimitable compositions of the American iconoclast Harry Partch, very much an outsider in life and work compared to the European modernists of the early 20th century. What the music also has in common with the other pieces in the LCMS programme however is the distinctive nature of the writing for the voice, Partch adopting just intonation precisely for a more natural expression of the spoken voice. We got a broad view of Partch's work from his earliest work in his new experimental style in Ten Lyrics of Li Po, Luke Fitzpatrick playing Partch's customised viola with a cello neck studded with little metal studs described as 'brads' in the programme notes. U.S. Highball however felt more authentic Partch, recounting his own lived experience as a hobo hopping trains across America, authentic also in its record of those whose company and adventures he shared, having tremendous value for that alone. Using an adapted fretless guitar, its notes and sounds played out on raised strings with picks on right hand and bottleneck slides on the left fingers, the whole piece as Charles Corey notes (and plays) "captures the relentless energy of freight trains barrelling down mountainsides".
You don't usually get an opera singer doing a recital at the LCMS, so when it looks like that is what has been programmed for the final evening concert of the festival, you can be sure it won't be a regular recital. Davóne Tines is however definitely a big name American bass-baritone in the opera world. I saw him in Amsterdam ten years ago when he made his first significant international appearance for the premiere of Kaija Saariaho's Only The Sound Remains at the DNO, and he has taken notable roles in premieres of John Adams' Girls of the Golden West and Terence Blanchard's powerful Fire Shut Up in My Bones, all indicating that Tines works outside the standard repertoire and very much in the sphere of new music. His Recital No. 1 - Mass then is indeed not just the regular programme of songs removed from their original context, but rather pieces selected and arranged to form a new context; a modern mass, so to speak, given appropriately in the St. Nicholas' Church of Ireland in Dundalk. And in that respect, it's also very much in this year's programme of finding creative and imaginative ways of interpreting words and finding a way to bring out other deeper personal meanings and ideas.
On paper Recital No. 1 - Mass is an eclectic mix; Handel and Bach side-by-side with Caroline Shaw and Julius Epstein, with spirituals arranged by Tyshawn Sorey, better known to me as a virtuoso jazz drummer but also pianist and composer. Conceptually however Tines had the whole recital perfectly arranged and measured and the voice to carry it off, accompanied only by the piano of John Bitoy. Bach's Mache dich, mein Herze, rein and the spirituals in particular were quite movingly sung and played, the church (or heavens) even playing its part in the evening by beaming a ray of the setting sun through the front windows of the church down to the altar to light up a ferocious delivery of Moses Hogan’s Give me Jesus. It's this kind of unpredictable and unprogrammable moment that you get more often than you would imagine possible at the LCMS and it's the kind of thing that makes the LCMS truly special. Whether the US bass-baritone succeeded in his aim of creating a queered mass or touching on something spiritually transcendental, Tines certainly made a case for the negro slave spirituals being as equally close to the love of God as Bach's celestial music, bringing humanity to the divinity. Somehow that seemed to be the perfect summation to the coming together of all the adventurous, surprising and uplifting music presented in this year's LCMS programme.
External links: Louth Contemporary Music Society
