Feldman - IMMA May 30th

Sunday 30 May, 2010

Review: Crash Ensemble, IMMA

By Pat O'Kelly 
Tuesday June 01 2010

Strange Folk - Montclair, New Jersey

Saturday 8 May, 2010

http://www.peakperfs.org/insite/?p=2105

As a critic, I do my best to find the meaning in art, to deconstruct why something exists, and sometimes that’s tough to answer. Sure, some art is overtly political, and some art can be a triumph of storytelling. Crash Ensemble, the Irish musical group that closed out another stellar season at Peak Performances, may have been both of those things, but I couldn’t tell—to me, the group was simply an aesthetic delight. 

 

Performing two separate concerts, Strange Folk on May 8 and Bright Visionon May 9, Crash Ensemble brought vitality and excitement to instrumental music that’s eluded my naive, pop-addled ears over my short lifetime. Perhaps I could make allusion to postminimalism or polystylism, but that would be doing a dishonor to the Wikipedia article I road in on. Instead, I’m content to share my delight over the sound that washed over the audience. 

 

From the first song of the first performance, Crash made an impression with its offbeat, strong, counterintuitive sounds. It was pure bravado. The performance continued with music just as dramatic and bold as the first piece but often laced with melancholy. At times, I felt as though I was listening to a wonderful hybrid of the Kronos Quartet and Daft Punk. At other times, it felt closer to Philip Glass combined with Bernard Herrmann or Clint Mansell, Jonny Greenwood, and Björk. All of these talents have in common the theme of repetition. The composer often repeated a refrain over and over, building on it each time, until seconds later, I was no longer listening to the same song—bizarrely, I never knew what would come next. Yes, the music had a certain consistency that never translated into a lack of imagination. 

 

The Sunday afternoon performance, while much more subdued, was in its own way just as bold as the Saturday performance. In one moment that evoked John Cage, a pianist, accompanied by an almost solar-bright light, stole the show with a performance that had the instrumentalist popping the keys while literally handling the strings inside the piano. At that moment, it was the purest music could be, removing the separation between the artist and the art. And yet, it wasn’t necessarily a statement being made but simply a necessity to achieve the desired sound. 

 

I said earlier that Crash Ensemble has a consistent sound, and I don’t think I’m wrong. Yet it’s undeniable that they bend genre to their whim. There were times when I felt like I was listening to the soundtrack of a Kennedy-era spy film/romantic comedy, and then minutes later, they evoked a melodic pattern reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim, while never losing their own very specific musical identity. I think I even heard a bit of a metal influence somewhere. 

 

So maybe everything about this description makes no sense; perhaps my expertise in the field of contemporary classical (isn’t that an oxymoron?) is limited to Béla Bartók, Eric Whitacre, and (ahem) John Williams. I could say it doesn’t matter, but that’d be a lie, since critics must understand the field they write about. I can only say this: the great pleasure and greatest triumph of Crash Ensemble—and indeed the best of Peak Performances—is not the one-sided artistic conversation that scares so many away from live performance. No. It’s the invigoration of knowing there’s an entire world of music and art to discover, waiting to be heard, seen, and experienced. It was a hell of a way to end the season—not with a bang, definitely not with a whimper, but with a crash.

 

DEAF: Roger Doyle @ 60

Sunday 25 October, 2009

"Standouts were Under the Green Time ('an image of Ireland without the sweet Celtic wrapping') for uilleann pipes and electronic tape, a gratingly sweet squall exploring the hitherto unremarked ground between traditional Irish and contemporary industrial music (performed by Brian O’Huiginn); Cool Steel Army for piano and laptop percussion, which sounded like a cross between Michael Nyman and Autechre’s 'Second Bad Vibel', periodic blasts of static giving heft to moody piano arpeggiation (performed by Doyle himself alongside Ian McDonnell); and Passades No. 6, an electro-acoustic work that was played over spacialised speakers to the apposite accompaniment of a black and white animated film lulling the viewer through hypnagogic abstractions."

Liam Cagney, www.musicalcriticism.com

DEAF: Mimimal

Saturday 24 October, 2009

"Crash are undoubtedly Ireland's foremost contemporary music outfit, their concerts always ones to look forward to on the musical calendar...they consistently attract a large audience for contemporary classical concerts – Saturday's concert was sold out, with a crowd outside the venue hoping for cancellation tickets – Crash's outlook is exemplary and to be commended."

Liam Cagney, www.musicalcriticism.com

Double Portrait: Lang & Andriessen

Friday 5 June, 2009

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

Free State: Kevin Volans

Thursday 9 April, 2009

“Crash Ensemble, bastion of contemporary music… Muted ripples blossom delicately like some exotic plant. Pizzicato cello sets the pulse while imperceptible tempo alterations create a hypnotic atmosphere… Come what may, Crash Ensemble is unflappable in execution” – Pat O’Kelly, The Irish Independent April 09 (Free State: Kevin Volans, April 09)

“Volans’ Nine beginnings was performed by the composer himself and John Godfrey. A stillness was created through a constant interweaving, interpolating and juxtaposing of materials arising out of a melodic fragment.

Trumpet, vibe, cello, piano was composed by Volans especially for the occasion. Crash Ensemble negotiated its demanding score with grace: it was a pleasure to be reminded of what pianissimo actually sounds like. Here the initial orchestration was the object – muted trumpet, a halo of vibraphone resonance, Feldman-like piano arpeggios and gentle cello pizzicato.

The evening was an apposite tribute to Kevin Volans; in its very many breathtaking moments, it was a reminder, as a fellow audience member remarked, that, in our lives, we need daily beauty.” -  Garrett Sholdice, Journal of Music June/July 09 (Free State: Kevin Volans, April 09)
 

World View 1 : UK

Friday 28 November, 2008

This well-structured programme presented the British side of a two-concert showcase for Irish and British contemporary music. It included the premiere of a Crash Ensemble commission, Darwin's Sin Draw , by Andrew Poppy (born 1954), which explores musical equivalents of Darwinian ideas. The solo violin (an excellent Darragh Morgan) tussles with the bass-strong ensemble's jagged ostinatos and driving rhythms, and seems to win.

It is hard to write funny music, but Cornish-born (1965) Richard Ayers can. His No 24 (NONcerto for Alto Trombone) (1995) featured impeccably silly interpretations of Ayres's stage directions by trombonist Roderick O'Keefe and tight conducting by Alan Pierson. The piece subverts all concert music, via musical non-sequiturs such as a chorus of lager louts and irreverent contrasts of material.

Prison Song, (2000) by Frank Denyer (born 1943), is more subtly subversive. The flautist does not blow, but breathes; the violin and trombone have muffling mutes - "the ghost of another music" indeed.

Straight Lines in Broken Times2, (1992) by Christopher Fox (born 1955), is a densely worked-out piece, full of concentrated detail, albeit within a somewhat diffuse structure. Nevertheless, its so-British concern with craft is admirable.

Craft was also evident in the control of material and the subtly powerful rhythmic energy of Grind Show (electric) (2007), by Tansy Davies (born 1973). It also lay behind the beautifully clear trajectories of Joe Cutler's (born 1968) Five Mobiles after Alexander Calder . The concert's most consistently luxurious aural experience was offered by Gavin Bryars's (born 1943) Sub Rosa (1986). Its shifts of instrumental tone, harmonics, and chordal colouring challenged the ear and lingered in the memory.

Martin Adams, The Irish Times, Dec 3rd 2008

FREE STATE III

Thursday 27 November, 2008

Crash Ensemble’s name conjures up an image of a group that abandons the established rules of the road in classical music.

Since its foundation ten years ago by composer Donnacha Dennehy, pianist Andrew Synott and clarinetist Michael Seaver, the outfit has made an impact in Ireland and, apparently, even more so abroad.

When it comes to music, the Crash abandons ‘safety first’, and its reputation at the cutting edge of contemporary composition has been veritably bulletproof for most of the decade.It doesn’t ‘do’ melody, lyricism or anything that can be described as normal in the conventional musical sense.
But it does do odd, eerie, off-the-wall and way-out. And whatever it does, it is not averse to being described by the New York Times ‘‘an Irish new music band that plays with the energy and spirit of a rock group’’.


The only certainty when listening to their sound is that when you allow yourself to be sucked into their sonic underworld (the theatre was pitch-black) you become totally absorbed. Take, for instance, the third piece of six compositions in Free State an annual celebration of new music premieres by Irish composers, now in its third year at the O’Reilly Theatre in Belvedere College in Dublin.

Written by Cork composer John Godfrey, it was titled The Abstract Despotisms of Calculus...

We were advised that the only way to fully experience this sound-altering phenomenon was to get out of our seats and go walkabout while Crash continued to play low-key instrumental sounds.

My favourite piece was Dublin composer John McLachlan’s Wonder, a gentle and introspective work with little pleasant sounds squirting out of the ensemble."

"...magnificent mayhem arrived in In Beautiful May, which had composer Andrew Hamilton exploring the music fetishes that cohabit one’s memory.This he achieved by trying to play a violin while short, sharp stabs of musical fragments, including rock, opera, country, classical and religious, blared out from the sound system.

The composer found inspiration for this from Schumann’s Dicterliebe, a fact which must be making Mozart, Mendelssohn and the rest turn in their graves. Bizarre, but riveting.

It was left to the final composition, however, to really justify that ‘‘rock band’’ accolade. Written by Parisbased Sean Clancy, Whisper, Whisper, Whisper at last unleashed Crash on a thundering piece of dissonance that belied its title.Gyorgy Ligeti and Gerald Barry were in there somewhere. It’s not normal but it certainly makes you think." Sunday Business Post, December 7th 2008

 

"Characteristically with this performing group, the strengths of the Irish programme were predominately conceptual. ... it was the composed sounds, the quirky and thought-provoking schemes, that made the evening."

"the most orthodoxly avant garde was Whisper Whisper Whisper* (2007) by the youngest of the six composers, Seán Clancy...This gritty little essay in mechanised expressionism took the Crash players closest to mainstream chamber music."

"

Adding to the seeping colours of a keyboarded background, silvery glockenspiel touches formed the most effective acoustic component in John McLachlan's drifting and enigmatic Wonder (2008).

Two further acoustic-electronic partnerships achieved cogency on the one hand and witty incongruity on the other.

Poignantly melodic playing from Deirdre O'Leary on bass clarinet was melded with restrained and thoughtful taped electronics in Jonathan Nangle's Our headlights blew softly into the black, illuminating very little (2007).

On solo violin and vocals, Andrew Hamilton deftly delivered the acoustic elements of his own In Beautiful May (2008), a cunningly paced join-the-dots exercise that gradually develops disparate sound-shards into a deliciously grotesque chorale.

Theatricality peaked with Peter Moran's self-analysing lecture A Casual Analysis of Prose Rhythms (2004). Punctuating the catchily variable sound patterns with woodblock, Natasha Lohan negotiated the fickle and sometimes headlong prosody to a fault.

Like the clang of some great bell frozen in time, however, it was John Godfrey's 20-minute experiment with tone in its purest form, The Abstract Despotisms of Calculus (2008), that created the evening's most potent chemistry of treasurable strangeness"

Andrew Johnstone, Dec 1st 2008, The Irish Times

 

 

Bang on a Can Marathon

Saturday 31 May, 2008

"Crash Ensemble, from Ireland, played colorful works by Donnacha Dennehy, its founder, and Terry Riley"
New York Times 

"Iarla Ó Lionáird's sweet voice riding atop the ensemble's furiously cascading arpeggios made for an ecstatic release"
Secret Society Blog 

"other highlights: Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás by the Crash Ensemble from Ireland"
Monotonous Forest Blog

Canberra International Chamber Music Festival

Monday 12 May, 2008

"Relentless as waves breaking over craggy rocks, this piece premiered at an Irish regional arts festival to an audience strongly familiar with the tradition it explores. Epic, driven, exciting and grossly over-amplified, it was an exercise in powerful emotion, textures and motions. I’ve never heard a trumpet asked to ramp its way through tonal landscapes like this." - Zsuzsanna Soboslay, realtimearts.net - Aug/Sept 08

Music of Phill Niblock

Wednesday 23 April, 2008

"This concert of music by Phill Niblock – the ‘forgotten minimalist’ – had the feel of a ‘happening’, spread out over the four back floors of the Temple Bar Galleries, a throwback to the 1960s, Andy Warhol-esque experiences with film projections...many around me seemed transported by the drone, sitting with eyes closed in a trance-like state."

Seán Ó Máill, JMI, July/August 08

SHINDIG - Marathon - 12-13.30

Saturday 13 October, 2007

"Crash have definitely change they stylistic expectation of the public in regard to new music in Ireland, taking it away from a bias towards European modernism, and that is an achievement belonging uniquely to them."

'There is an iconoclastic quality in their programming that seeks to work against prevailing currents, and this is not a figment of their imaginations"

"They have pushed the contemporary music culture in Ireland in a direction that it simply wasn't going heretofore, and they have placed performers inside that culture more strongly that before."

John McLachlan JMI NovDec 07 

SHINDIG - Marathon - 14-15.30

Saturday 13 October, 2007

"there is no denying Crash's effectiveness of purpose"

"Where such maverick tendencies are found in Ireland and in Europe, Crash embraces them. The tension and sometimes extraordinary conflict of style that this involves has always been a regular feature of Crash Ensemble concerts, and this is another way in which they have been usefully unique here."

"their programmes always reflecting the messy reality of music today."

John McLachlan JMI NovDec 07

SHINDIG - Marathon - 16-17.30

Saturday 13 October, 2007

"But of course who we are [as Irish people], if it can ever be meaningfully discussed at all, is a dynamic ever changing picture of which Crash is now part."

"[Crash are] central to the rapid development of a rich electronica scene that didn't exist not so long ago, in which new hybrids are flourishing." 

"admirably, premiere does not also mean derniére with Crash." 

John McLachlan JMI NovDec 07

SHINDIG - Marathon - 19-20.30

Saturday 13 October, 2007

"Some exceptional highlights being [...] Glass's Music in Similar Motion, which the ensemble enjoyed taking at a fair lick, Erik Lund's Missing Intelligence was for me the discovery of the day - a tremendous piece that successfully combined the diverse stylistic strands that Crash bring; quite funky but also embracing complexity"

 John McLachlan JMI NovDec 07

SHINDIG - Marathon - 21-22.30

Saturday 13 October, 2007

Attending the entire marathon was tiring but uplifting. The venue, the converted church of Saints Michael and John in Temple Bar, has the best acoustics of any I have heard the Crash use in Dublin, and the way that the 30 works were grouped almost always felt right. Not one of the performances was below par.


But for sheer compositional pizazz, it was hard to beat Terry Riley's Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle. Written for the Crash Ensemble and premiered at the Drogheda Arts Festival earlier this year, this three- movement work sees the legendary Californian letting his hair down. Packed with direct aural references, and executed with cheeky enjoyment and technical flair, it suggests primitivism, exoticism, battle sounds, and what seemed like ambulance sirens at the end. What else do you need after a battle?

His setting of Aisling Gheal creates a beautifully scored and harmonically coloured backdrop to the song; and Grá agus Bás is nothing less than a transmutation of traditional style, with Ó Lionáird's beautiful singing woven into sounds imbued with harmonic overtones.No wonder this piece made such an impact when it was played in the USA earlier this year. It is deeply expressive, and shows that this ensemble can caress just as effectively as it can crash.  - Martin Adams Irish Times Oct 07

Crash & Dennehy in NY

Wednesday 28 March, 2007

From the New York Times:

“a magnificently energetic, wildly cacophonous vocal work”

“the Irish new-music band that plays with the energy and spirit of a rock group”

“Iarla O Lionaird sang the Gaelic text with simplicity and directness in a plaintive folk style, and the ensemble — amplified strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and electric guitar, with Alan Pierson conducting — gave it a powerful account”

 
link

Strange Folk!

Saturday 10 February, 2007

"The overall experience was gripping, with moments of fierce, almost ritualistic clangour. It will be interesting to hear Grá agus Bás again."

Journal of Music in Ireland, March 2007

(IR)RATIONAL

Thursday 9 November, 2006

"The satisfying programme, including three of [Tenney's] central pieces, ranged from austere and demanding, to riotous and quirky."

"Critical Band... Its a pattern to observe, rather than music to listen to - but incredibly interesting, simple yet inspired, and demanding."

Alan O'Riordan, Irish Examiner, 14th Nov 06 

Dublin Fringe Festival 2004

Sunday 10 October, 2004

“First honour in presenting a new work fell to the Crash Ensemble, premiering Kevin Volans’ 1000 Bars for violin, cello and piano duet… This was a quirky and consistently amusing piece, and the playing communicated it with meticulous care.” – The Irish Times

Gaudeamus Music Week

Monday 6 to Sunday 12 September, 2004

“Most spectacular was Junk Box Fraud by Donnacha Dennehy, in which two singers, two pianos and two winds made a brash sweep from prickling dissonant music to barking major sounds. The accompanying film had a Greenaway-ish allure.” – Frits van der waa De Volkskrant

Crash 2003 Festival

Wednesday 3 December, 2003

The Irish Times (Review of the Year)            16 December, 2003

The Crash Ensemble continues to explore the wilder shores and is without doubt the healthiest contemporary ensemble in this country, with commissions, tours (Denmark, Sweden and England this year) and festivals (the latest just before Christmas) that set Irish music in an international context. …everything is done with iconoclastic confidence and vigour.

John Field Room, 1999

Sunday 26 September, 1999

“The Crash Ensemble has established something of a reputation not just for selling out their concerts, but for having to turn people away on the night. The group’s first appearance in the John Field Room on Sunday ran true to form.” – The Irish Times

“Accomodating mew music ensemble Crash helps the NCH deflect accusations of musical museum status. The transition worked well, with the availabile space – including staircase and balcony – uniquely exploited. A full house heard well-mixed instrumental sonorities in Michael Gordon’s pulsing Yo! Shakespeare, the soundless bow-swiping of Isak Goldschneider’s Four Eyes, multifarious vocal agility in Stripsody by Cathy Berberian and finely blended clarinet playing in Stockhausen’s Knabbenduett. The engaging imaginative display of Donnacha Dennehy’s Junk Box Fraud secured, as previously, the warmest reception.” – Michael Dungan, The Evening Herald

Samuel Beckett Theatre, 23 Oct '97

Thursday 23 October, 1997

“October saw the launch of the Crash Ensemble, a contemporary music group which had to turn people away from its sold-out first gig. With really exciting programming […], this is a group to watch out for.” – Michael Dervan, The Irish Times