“Gerald Barry is always sober,” Mauricio Kagel once said of his former pupil, “but might as well always be drunk”. That sums up the Irishman’s music perfectly: it can be enchanting, exhilarating, wildly funny, frighteningly violent or downright infuriating, sometimes all at the same time. It’s a mixture that has made Barry’s operas, especially The Importance of Being Earnest and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, so successful. But that same anarchic unpredictability has always come through in his smaller-scale works, too, as this collection from the members of the Fidelio Trio – violinist Darragh Morgan, cellist Adi Tai and pianist Mary Dullea – demonstrates.
The earliest piece here dates from 1979, when Barry was using symbols as titles for his music; the austere Ø is a piano quartet, which began life as an exercise in ornamentation and coordination for two pianos. The most recent is All Day at Home Busy with my Own Affairs, a three-minute piano piece from 2015, which Barry himself plays on the disc, and is based on music from his yet-to-be-performed Salome opera. The longest piece here is 1998, for violin and piano, in which the abrupt exchanges between the two instruments gradually attain some kind of continuity. The shortest, also for violin and piano, are the miniatures, each less than a minute long, that make up Baroness von Ritkart (named after a character in Chekhov).
Le Vieux Sourd is a piano piece of Ivesian wildness, brilliantly played here by Dullea, whose rampagings take in the tune of Auld Lang Syne, while Midday is an obsessive, naggingly memorable tick-tocking piece (violin and piano again). Piano trio In the Asylum ends with a paraphrase of God Save the Queen, while Triorchic Blues is the trio version of a piece that can be an instrumental solo, or a coloratura aria sung in Barry’s opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit. The composer contributes his own sleeve notes, as elliptical and charming as his music; whatever Barry does, he’s never dull.
This week’s other pick
Barry and Kevin Volans have been friends since the 1970s, when both were studying with Stockhausen and Kagel in Cologne. The South African-born Volans later settled in Ireland, but despite their shared background, the music of the two composers has developed in very different directions. Six of Volans’s piano Etudes, played by Jill Richards, are paired on a Diatribe release with Liszt pieces played by Volans himself.
Most of the Etudes use material from earlier works – the second, for instance, incorporates a passage from Volans’s 1997 cello concerto, the third shares ideas with his second string quartet – but what they have in common is a transcendental brilliance, which Richards conveys wonderfully.
