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Emanating Sparks

At this year’s Drogheda Arts Festival, Louth Contemporary Music Society presented a spectralist work from the 1970s alongside a postminimalist one from the last decade and a series of techno-inspired shorts. Brendan Finan from the Journal of Music finds the connections. BRENDAN FINAN
Four Thousand Holes at ST. PETER’S CHURCH OF IRELAND as part of Drogheda Arts Festival 2018.
Photo : Jenny Matthews Photography

Drogheda Arts Festival is an annual early-summer festival devoted to a cross-section of the arts. This year, classical and contemporary music were represented by a concert at St Peter’s Church of Ireland on 5 May, organised in collaboration with Louth Contemporary Music Society. The main performer was pianist Taka Kigawa, playing works by Karen Tanaka and Tristan Murail, before being joined by percussionist Russell Greenberg (who recently performed with Yarn | Wire at the Music Current Festival) for the night’s featured work, John Luther Adams’ Four Thousand Holes.

Louth Contemporary Music Society, whose founder, Eamonn Quinn, was recently awarded the Belmont Prize for contemporary music, deserves the credit it gets for bringing extraordinary composers and performers to Ireland. More than that, it deserves recognition for its stylistic agnosticism; rarely does a concert feature a spectralist work from the 1970s alongside a postminimalist one from the last decade and a series of techno-inspired shorts. LCMS stands out not only for programming such works together, but for finding their inherent connections.

Read the full review here 

Published on 16 May 2018 in the Journal of Music

Brendan Finan is a teacher and writer living in Meath. He writes a blog at www.brendanfinan.net.