VOICE OF THE FAITHFULL JOINS THE ORCHESTRA
By Andrea Rea
News Letter, UK
Oct 4 2005
It has been a busy time for the arts here recently, with performing
organisations professional, amateur and in between beginning their
season’s work and some companies already on tour. It’s hard sometimes
to decide which concert, recital or show to attend and now it’s
October, and soon there will be even more performances to tempt us.
The Belfast Festival at Queen’s opens its many doors in a few weeks,
and there are concerts, recitals, films, plays, exhibitions and
lectures to choose from. My advice would be to try and sample a bit
of everything. You’ll finish the fortnight a good deal more tired
than when you began it, but come away enriched and with a bit of luck,
challenged too. The brilliant thing about the festival is that it gives
you a chance to see and hear things you might not have experienced
before. For example, during the popular Music at Ten series in the
Harty Room, there’s a recital of baroque cello and theorbo and you
might not have heard a theorbo lately unless you managed to see Opera
Theatre Company’s recent production of Monteverdi, in which case you
saw two.
It looks like a huge lute and is a very interesting, versatile
instrument. In the same series there’s a concert of solo recorder
music – also something that doesn’t come around every day. The music
of Armenian/American composer Alan Hovhaness is being explored in
a concert at Clonard Monastery, with the Ulster Orchestra and the
Belfast Philharmonic choir.
Hovhaness writes extraordinarily beautiful music which prepared the
way for composers like PÂrt and Rautavaara, both of whom have been
featured in past Festivals.
One of the rock/classical crossovers is Sixties’ chanteuse Marianne
Faithfull at the opening concert, with the Ulster Orchestra and
Renaissance Singers, but for more challenging stuff, be sure to get
to at least one of the performances listed under the New Music section
of the Festival programme.
Quite a few of these revolve around the music of Steve Reich,
the experimental and original American composer who celebrates his
60th birthday next year. Reich once described hearing music he was
unfamiliar with as ‘suddenly walking into a room you’d never been
in before and wanting to stay forever’. Reich’s own music has been
described as minimalist, using percussion effects and phasing, as
well as aspects of Western classical music and vernacular and ethnic
material. His large work for orchestra and choir, The Desert Music,
is being performed as part of the closing concert of the Festival.
The choir in question will be the National Chamber Choir, who gave
a concert in St George’s Church in Belfast last Friday night.
It was a bit like a whole festival in one performance, so varied was
the programme, although with an overall theme. The concert Motets and
the Bard examined the marriage of words and music in motets composed
over the course of five centuries or so. The National Chamber Choir
has always been known for its ability to manage an extraordinarily
wide range of repertoire, and this concert showcased that ability
wonderfully.
Their conductor Celso Antunes gets quite a red-blooded sound from them,
and makes clever and often essential use of different arrangements of
singers on stage. The singers themselves come from diverse backgrounds
and cultures. In addition to Ireland north and south, the countries
of Poland, New Zealand, Latvia and Holland are represented by choir
members, all of whom live in Ireland now. The concert was stunningly
well-presented and an eye and ear opener for anyone there. Do try
to hear them at the Festival, and while you’re at it, have a go at
something else that takes you off the beaten track. You’ll be glad
you did.
–Boundary_(ID_9bWzkbit+Xy55ii6cwVLZw)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress