The performance will be a significant cultural event as it be the first major performance of  Gubaidulina’s music in Ireland. Gubaidulina has been commissioned and performed by, among others, the Louisville Orchestra (1989), the Kronos Quartet (New York, 1994), (Washington, DC, 1994), Yuri Bashmet with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Kent Nagano (1997), the New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Masur (1999), and Gidon Kremer.

The performance in St.Peter’s Church of Ireland on 1 May 2010 will include:
Gubaidulina Reflection on a Theme B-A-C-H
Heath Quartet

Bach Cello Suite
Ivan Monighetti

Gubaidulina Garden of Joy and Sorrow
The Oriel Trio

Gubaidulina In Croce
Dermot Dunne + Ivan Monighetti

Gubaidulina Repentance
Ivan Monighetti, Dublin Guitar Quartet + Malachy Robinson.

A Free viewing of the Barrie Gavin film A Fire and a Rose scripted by Gerard McBurney will take place in the afternoon of 1 May 2010. Plus a schools workshop concentrating on Sofia Gubaidulina’s music will take place the previous week.
Tickets €15 from www.centralticketbureau.com

In January 2007, Gubaidulina was the first woman composer to be spotlighted by the BBC during its annual “composer weekend” in London. Among her most recent compositions are Feast During a Plague (2005), jointly commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra – and conducted in Philadelphia by Sir Simon Rattle and in Pittsburgh and New York by Sir Andrew Davis – and In Tempus Praesens, a new violin concerto unveiled at the 2007 Lucerne Festival by Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Rattle.

Sofia Gubaidulina is the leading name in contemporary Russian music. She is one of those composers whose works were forbidden performance in her own country for many years, and who was subjected to the severest repression.  Almost unknown in the West until the Iron Curtain fell, her music is now in great demand by artists all over the world.

One of the most widely acclaimed composers to emerge from the Soviet Union in its final decades of existence, Sofia Gubaidulina (born1931) forged a unique musical language marked by such diverse elements as Christian spirituality, musical symbolism, unique structures derived from fragmentation and repetition of simple material, and the use of folk instruments from the Central Asian regions where her own roots lay.

“Every composition is an enormous labor for me,” Gubaidulina told Karen Campbell of the Christian Science Monitor. At the beginning, she said, she hears in her head “a vertical sound of colorful, moving, clashing chords, completely mixed up and jumbled. It is wonderful and beautiful, but it isn’t real. My job is to turn that vertical sound into a horizontal line. Those two lines, horizontal and vertical, make a cross, and I think about that when I compose.” That statement might serve as a kind of compositional credo for Gubaidulina, whose work has successfully merged spiritual influences with extremely original techniques. That combination hampered Gubaidulina’s early career, when the repression of creative artists by the Soviet state was at its height, but in the eclectic 1980s and 1990s she became one of the hottest new composers on the international classical scene.

Tavener, Part, Knaifel, Silvestrov, Gorecki, Cage

Louth Contemporary Music Society

LCM 5901—65 minutes (cdbaby.com—800- BUYMYCD)

The Louth Contemporary Music Society brings world-renowned contemporary musicians, performers, and composers for performances and educational work in Louth, Ireland. In this release, a group of musicians (Patricia Rosario,soprano; the Callino Quartet; Michael McHale, piano; Ioana Petcu-Colan, violin; Vourneen Ryan, flute; and Stephen Kelly, percussion) performs a group of works by composers who have been attracted by spirituality or who otherwise cultivate a sense of stillness in their music. Most of this music is resolutely triadic, and a few of the works flirt with the idea of a musically distant past, as in Pärt’s Da Pacem Domine (2004-2008).

These musicians are some of the most selfless I know, for the liner notes offer no information about them whatsoever. But maybe that’s part of the point, for the overwhelming feeling I have listening to this is of some timeless, eternal music that rejects almost every sense of the modern in favor of simple and sometimes naive musical gestures.

The two opening tracks are representative.John Tavener’s Ikon is a very straightforward string quartet work where a simple melody in tenths unfolds lazily over a pedal point of D and A. Pärt’s Hymn for a Great City, a two piano piece (both parts played by McHale and knitted together through the more mundane mysteries of postproduction) was written in honor of New York. A dominant-tonic progression in D-flat alternates with other two-chord progressions, later ornamented by modest arpeggios.

Now I’m not one to dismiss tonal-sounding or very simple-sounding music out of hand. And yet, as I quipped to a friend, these two pieces are very 1988: they bespeak a worldview that’s very hard to accept after Nicolae Ceausescu, the Tiananmen Square Protests, Darfur, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Our world is too complex for these works to be as credible as they once were. To be sure, some of it endures: Pärt’s Tabula Rasa still transports me, but Hymn to a Great City seems to offer little more than transient escapism.

Two other works are more impressive: Alexander Knaifel’s Oh Heavenly King (1994, rev. 2009) and Henryk Gorecki’s Good Night.Perhaps I like them better because they include a singer (Rosario is perfect for this music). But the two pieces are also more elusive more ambiguous in tonality and in timbre.Gorecki’s piece, a lamentation for Michael Vyner (music director of the London Sinfonietta from 1972 until he died in 1989), recalls the desolate grief of his third symphony and rings as true as that work: its scale (some 30 minutes) also seems more fitting for this sort of music.

My favorite work of all is a short one and seems to share many of the same qualities as its neighbors: Valentin Silvestrov’s Ikon is a string quartet piece that explores an arresting turning melodic figure that cadences with a perfect fifth and then repeats, each repetition sounding a step lower. Every now and then sense a shadow of Landini, or perhaps of Machaut. Yet when the work is over I want to hear it again. And then again. This is music of mystery and it moves me very, very deeply: Silvestrov’s Ikon testifies to the continuing relevance of such music despite the sadness and complexity of today’s world.

HASKINS

Dublin Guitar Quartet, Malachy Robinson , The Oriel Trio

“Uri Caine is a king among princes, a consummate musician who sounds great whether playing Bach, accompanying Don Byron on Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, wrangling an ambitious avant-jazz ensemble around the music of Mahler . . . . . He is prolific, hugely proficient, and ambitious.”John Walters, Guardian

Louth Contemporary Music Society’s first concert for 2010 featured a performance by the great American pianist Uri Caine in St.Peter’s Church of Ireland Drogheda on 5 March 2010 at 8pm.

Pianist and composer Uri Caine gleefully and artfully ignores the boundaries between musical genres, mixing up Mahler and Bach with original music, swinging bebop and hard-hitting drum-and-bass. He launches LCMS 2010 concerts by performing John Zorn’s Book of Angel’s Volume 6: Moloch.

Moloch is a remarkable set of piano solos. Some of these pieces are dark, others very beautiful. All are played superbly and imaginatively. Uri Caine is a Philadelphia-raised virtuoso, unconfined by genres. Likewise-unfettered is the music’s composer, John Zorn, from whose Book of Angels {Masada Book Two} these pieces come.

In addition to performing solo and with his own ensemble, Caine has worked with groups, including those led by by Don Byron, Sam Rivers, Clark Terry, Arto Lindsay,John Zorn and Barry Altschul. He has also performed with the Woody Herman Band, the Enja Band, and Global Theory. Caine has appeared at many jazz festivals including the What is Jazz? Festival, the Texaco Jazz Festival (New York), the Montreal Jazz Festival, Jazz Across the Borders (Berlin), and the Newport Jazz Festival. Appearances at classical music festivals include the Salzburg Festival, the Holland Festival, and the Israel Festival. Caine is the recipient of grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Uri Caine was presented by Louth Contemporary Music Society (LCMS) in association with Louth County Arts Office. Uri Caine is funded by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and financially supported by the the Louth Arts Office.

Tickets €15 are available from

www.centralticketbureau.com

Tel: 0818 205 205 (ROI)

0870 850 2896 (UK)