Sounds of the Silk Road

Drogheda Arts Festival

THE EXPLOITATION of Silk Road connections in music has been a huge success. Add a Silk Road link to any piece of music, it seems, or even just a Silk Road tag, and you will increase interest in it.

Louth Contemporary Music Society's Sounds of the Silk Roadprogramme at Drogheda Arts Festival on Friday extended the historic route both eastwards and westwards, to embrace the work of a contemporary American composer of Japanese extraction, Ken Ueno, as well as a piece by the medieval Frenchman Pérotin.

The evening’s focus, however, was the work of the Tashkent-born composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky. His new Morning, a setting of American poet Robert Lax, premièred by the Hilliard Ensemble and cellist Ivan Monighetti with the EQ Ensemble under Jean Thorel, was as perplexing a piece as I’ve heard in years.

It opened with a slow cello solo which was strange and plaintive, and beautifully performed by Monighetti. But it was oddly assembled, and the piece as a whole was desultory in its progress. Everything somehow contrived to sound disconnected, even when the associations of word-painting – “whirling” or “danced” – were perfectly clear. Perhaps the composer was hoping to present the “in the beginning” of the poem as a kind of vaporous primeval chaos.

His Night Music: Voice in the Leaves(2000) for instrumental ensemble and tape (an evocatively distant voice) was altogether more conventional and persuasive in the way it explored the rustles and rumbles of the night.

Ueno’s Shiroi Ishi (White Stone) for vocal quartet essayed a density of linguistic significances that would only have been decipherable by a Japanese speaker and which was not fully counterparted by the purely musical interest of its restricted musical material and friction-rich consonants.

Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s Ask Havasi is a cello solo that seems to express an inward, sated ecstasy, with moments of quiet ululation and passages using strange-stepped musical scales.

Ashgabat-born Iraida Yusupova’s Kitezh-19, for theremin (Lydia Kavina) and tape, took its inspiration from legend (the invisible city of Kitezh) and reality, those cities which, for military reasons, are closed to outsiders and erased from maps. It’s a theatrical piece that freely blends visual and musical imagery – a torch flashing signals, the theremin pulsing on a single note like the repeating light of a rotating beacon, the disembodied tone of the instrument’s higher reaches sounding perfect for the role Yusupova assigned it, the shuddering effects that can be released in its bass register sounding equally unique.