Notable event on the horizon

THE RTÉ Living Music Festival is a still lamented post-Celtic-Tiger casualty on Dublin’s cultural landscape.

In the years from 2006, it brought the likes of Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt to Dublin amid comprehensive performances of their work.

Now, at last, a replacement is on the horizon: New Music Dublin, a weekend of contemporary music from Irish and international composers, with performances from the National Symphony Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, Johann Johannsson and A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

Conductor Fergus Sheil is working as a programme coordinator with the festival. He says the roots of New Music Dublin lie in the demise of the Living Music Festival. “Financial pressures brought an end to that,” he says, “and I was one of a number who would have suggested that the Arts Council and RTÉ and the Concert Hall work together to find a replacement.”

New music, art music, contemporary classical — it can often be the poor relation compared to tried-and-tested masters of the classical repertoire. New Music Dublin is set to run for five years initially, securing a place on the cultural calendar for this exciting art form. “I think it’s terrifically important,” says Shiel. “Unless we are creating new music and toying with new ideas, then music becomes a museum. The thing about it is it’s experimental in many ways. If you look at the established classical repertoire, that has gone through a process of refinement. The greats have risen, but lots of others have slipped off. With this music we can consider what is great, what is nice to hear again, or what is something that’s interesting to hear, but maybe just once. There’s that variety.”

Supplementing the main performances, big and small, will be a variety of events around the National Concert Hall: 1:1 concerts, where members of the public can get up close to musicians for micro-performances dotted around the building’s small rooms and offices; a choral composition workshop that’s open to anyone who can sing; a new music marathon run by the Centre for Contemporary Music.

This packed schedule will create a buzz around the Concert Hall, something which should help bring the crowds out to what, outside of the festival context, can be a hard sell. “The reason the festival is very good is that it gives you a platform,” says Shiel. “A festival gives an opportunity to talk between concerts, to consider things, so I think it’s an ideal environment for new music.

“If you put on a once-off event it can sometimes be hard to get the attention it deserves, but put on a festival and say there’s going to be events all weekend and people can drop in and out, you attract audiences that way.”

The festival opens this Friday afternoon with a performance of Saltarello by viola player Gareth Knox’s trio. Saltarello is a kind of 14th-century Italian dance, and Knox uses it as the basis of an extraordinary exploration of 1,000 years of music.

Friday evening sees the world premiere of trombonist Christian Lindberg’s Kundraan and the Arctic Light, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra and conducted by the composer.

The effects of James Joyce’s works coming into the public domain will be felt on Saturday in the form of Counterparts, a part-written, part-improved suite based on Joyce’s words, the music found in his works and the street sounds of Dublin and Paris.

On Sunday afternoon, Dublin’s new music stalwarts, the Crash Ensemble, will be performing music from Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany in what used to be the engineering library back whenthe Concert Hall was part of UCD.

For Shiel the most anticipated event comes on Saturday evening: a performance of Arvo Pärt’s fourth symphony.

The work is from 2009 and, says Shiel, “there have been very few performances so far. It really is, relatively speaking, hot off the presses.

Pärt’s music has an ethereal beauty, yet the subject of this is a criticism of Vladmir Putin and the imprisonment of dissidents in Russia. So you have this critique of that totalitarian tendency in what is supposed to be a democracy that is utterly beautiful.”

* New Music Dublin is at the National Concert Hall, Mar 1-3. See nch.ie