Zephyr Ends With Irish Twist
Zephyr Tuesday, June 16, The Met
The Irish may have saved Western civilization as a recent book proclaims. But classical music does not play a large role in most people’s picture of the art of the Irish. Leave it to the Zephyr series to bring Spokane some music from the auld sod that is far removed from the rollicking repertoire of The Chieftains or Cherish the Ladies.
Pianist and Zephyr founder Kendall Feeney, poet James McAuley and seven musicians celebrated the work of James Joyce and the end of the 1997-98 Zephyr season Tuesday at The Met. The imaginative program included Irish and Irish-inspired 20th-century classical music. Some of the music was hauntingly beautiful, some tangy and bitter and some quite funny. The performances were in typical Zephyr style - a deep commitment to high-quality.
An added attraction Tuesday was McAuley’s readings from Joyce’s poetry and prose. Passages from the novel “Ulysses” set the mood of the music. “The Irish love useless words,” McAuley says. “We revere language for its pleasure and eloquence.”
The same proved true of the evening’s music.
For me, the evening’s most captivating performance was McAuley’s reading of a handful of enigmatic fragments by Joyce to the spare accompaniment and musical commentary of solo clarinet written by Ian Wilson and excellently played by Anthony Taylor. The words were the result of an unrequited love Joyce had, sketchy descriptions of fleeting moments and situations. Wilson’s music subtly underlined Joyce’s fluttery, ghostly images and feeling.
Martin O’Leary’s musical settings of poems from Joyce’s “Chamber Music” were equally sparse and their wide-ranging, difficult lines were beautifully performed by mezzo-soprano Heather Peterson and Irish harpist Jan Turley. Peterson was accompanied by Feeney in more traditional settings of some of the same Joyce poems by older Irish composers, Walter Beckett and Havelock Nelson. These songs contained writing much like the neo-romanticism of Samuel Barber or more pungent style of Ned Rorem.
The program’s only blatantly Irish music, in the traditional sense, was written by a Swiss, Frank Martin.
The other non-Irish composer on the program was an American, John Corigliano. His settings of three Irish folksongs for tenor and flute are lilting and light. Bruce Bodden wove a sprightly ornamented line around the traditional melodies. The vocal part demanded more in the way of charm, lightness and vocal color than nasal tone and operatic heft given them by tenor Tod Rainey.
What a pleasure, though, to hear an excellently performed concert of unfamiliar music that revels in the sensuous gratifications of language - both verbal and musical.