Michael Dervan

Martin Luther, Brian Boydell and Salvatore Sciarrino were all celebrated at three very different musical celebrations during the past week.

Up-ending convention

Italian composer Sciarrino, who turned 70 in April, had a youthful interest in painting, in common with Boydell. The latter was always a musical conservative. As a student I heard him declare electronic music to be rubbish on the basis that he had tried it out himself, and he called Karlheinz Stockhausen a charlatan.

Sciarrino is anything but conservative. His music often breaks ground in ways that almost up-end the conventional approach to sound. He eschews the middle ground in favour of a focus on timbres and gestures that are often no more than incidental in the music of other composers, a mere wisp effectively enlarged to take on a life of its own, a silence pregnant with meaning from the sometimes scarcely audible sounds that preceded it.

Salvatore Sciarrino’s visit came through the Louth Contemporary Music Society’s Silenzio Festival, which presented five events in Dundalk on Saturday, including a low-key but highly illuminating interview between the composer and Paul Griffiths.

The day’s major work, the Madrigali of 2007, settings of haiku by Basho performed with breathtaking savoir-faire by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, may have suffered by coming at the end of a concert sequence during which concentration had been the order of the day.

Sciarrino’s works involving flute (played by Matteo Cesari both solo and combinations with soprano Valentina Colodonato and the Quartetto Prometeo) are the ones that seem to convey the essence of his musical vision most effectively. It’s almost as if the listener is placed inside the instrument, where sounds that are normally too slight to be noticed can become the focus of attention, and other fierce attacks transfix listeners with the strength of their windy, outdoor ferocity.

But more important than all of the music’s sonic qualities is the way Sciarrino gives the impression of redrawing time, of controlling stillness through a kind of rapture, that makes his music so unusually gripping.

Louth Contemporary Music Society has a reputation that was recognised internationally earlier this year by the award to its founder, Eamonn Quinn, of the €20,000 Belmont Prize, for innovative programming. The Silenzio Festival further cements that reputation.