Double Portrait: Lang & Andriessen
Friday 5 June, 2009
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
Cutting-edge Irish music collective Crash Ensemble showcases the innovative music of Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang alongside that of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen in ‘Double Portrait’ on June 5th in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin.
Along with performances of music by David Lang, including the 2008 Crash Ensemble commissioned ‘Forced March’, Crash Ensemble will feature the work of Louis Andriessen, one of the most influential European composers of our time.
The works of this well matched duo will make for an energetic, high-octane performance, which has become a trademark of Crash Ensemble’s many concerts.
Louis Andreissen’s influence over the contemporary Irish music scene is palpable and his presence was instrumental in the establishment of Crash Ensemble in 1997 by composer and Crash Ensemble Artistic Director Donnacha Dennehy. As a composer Andriessen is both provocative and enticing, his influence on the contemporary music scene resonates globally. Famed for collaborations with Peter Greenaway, Hal Hartley and Robert Wilson, Louis Andriessen is frequently credited with having changed the face of music.
Recently appointed composer in residence for 2009-2010 in Carnegie Hall, this Dublin performance of his works celebrates the composer’s 70th birthday.
In Double Portrait Crash Ensemble will also be performing works by the American composer David Lang , who is at the forefront of the dynamic contemporary music scene in New York. Having won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Little Match Girl Passion; an intrepid work commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Lang continues to surprise and delight. Lang is co-founder of legendary new music group ‘Bang on a Can’ in New York City, a collective exposing exciting and innovative music to new audiences worldwide.
Double Portrait presents a musical reflection on two of the most exciting composers of these times. David Lang credits Andriessen as a major influence on his work and in turn on the celebrated Bang on a Can collective, extolling his admiration for Andriessen’s radical approach to composition: Talking of Andriessen's Worker's Union (featured on the concert) Lang praises Andriessen's radicalism in freeing us from the "tyranny of orchestration, harmony or pitch.”
Double Portrait sees a welcome return for Crash Ensemble to the Samuel Beckett Theatre and also marks the Ensemble’s indelible 11-year mark on the Irish and global music scene.
BOOKING INFORMATION
Double Portrait | Friday June 5 | 8pm | Samuel Beckett Theatre | (01) 896 2461 | €20/15
www.tcd.ie/drama/samuel-beckett-theatre
REVIEWS
Louis Andriessen, the best-known living composer from the Netherlands, was the subject of the début concert by the Crash Ensemble back in 1997. Crash celebrated his 70th birthday at the venue of that début appearance this weekend (a day before the actual birthday), and paired Andriessen’s work with pieces by David Lang (born 1957), a composer from the other side of the Atlantic (New York resident, but Los Angeles born), for whom Andriessen proved to be a seminal influence.
For Lang, Andriessen’s achievement was that he simply ignored the dichotomy between minimalism and modernism, a dichotomy, Lang says, which was felt far more keenly in the US than in Europe. Andriessen undermined the dichotomy by simply taking what he wanted from either side of the divide.
Lang, one of the trio of composers behind one of New York’s big new music franchises, Bang on A Can, shares with Andriessen a fondness for punchy impact (brake drums feature in the percussion line-up for a number of pieces), but this programme enterprisingly showed softer sides in the outputs of both men.
This seemed entirely apt in excerpts from Lang’s Memory Pieces (memory here used in the sense of memorial) for solo piano. Andriessen’s Garden of Eros is a string quartet with a light, floating quality that goes against the grain of the genre by pitting first violin against the other three instruments.
Such internal conflicts were also a feature of Lang’s Pierced, a kind of concerto for a trio of cello, percussion and piano (set against single strings in Crash’s performance rather than string orchestra) where soloists and ensemble inhabit independent worlds. Lang’s Forced March explores the interaction of an irregular melody against explosively drum-machine-like percussion.
The tour-de-force performance, however, was Andriessen’s Workers Union of 1975, a piece without fixed scoring that’s intended “for any loud sounding group of instruments”. One of Crash’s trademarks is the group’s fondness for amplification (here it was applied with timbre-distorting effect to Memory Pieces and Garden of Eros), and in Workers Union it helped the ensemble to the rock music-like consistency of high volume that its audiences seem to like so much. MICHAEL DERVAN - The Irish Times, Tuesday 9th June 2009