3 days ago
The Hermes Experiment review: As the lines blur between original works and arrangements, this concert becomes almost mesmerising
The Hermes Experiment
Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle
★★★★☆
Musical transcription, arrangement and variation have been with us forever. Or at least since the first human heard the likes of a cuckoo or maybe some long-extinct bird and chose to imitate it.
Before the invention of sound recording, transcriptions and arrangements were essential for anyone trying to build a knowledge of music. You could buy solo piano or piano-duet arrangements of symphonies, operas, oratorios, chamber music, even a piano-duet version of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata aimed at players whose technique did not rise to the solo version.
Orchestral arrangements brought early music to audiences who might otherwise not have got to hear it. Sheet-music sales peaked about a century ago, when electrical recording and radio broadened the range of music that was readily available for hearing.
But arrangements have been on the rise in recent decades. Can you name a single work for violin, guitar and accordion? Or tuba, piano and percussion? Or soprano, clarinet, double bass and harp?
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The first combination is
headlined
by Nicola Benedetti and can be heard at the National Concert Hall in November. The second is led by Daniel Herskedal, whose jazz-classical-fusion trio
tours
for Music Network in October. And the third is the line-up for
The Hermes Experiment
– Héloïse Werner, Oliver Pashley, Marianne Schofield and Anne Denholm-Blair – who open
Dublin International Chamber Music Festival
at the Royal Chapel in Dublin Castle on Wednesday.
This group has been ploughing its individual furrow to high praise for more than a decade, during which time it has commissioned more than 60 works, three of which appear in their Dublin programme: Laura Moody's intense Rilke Songs, Lisa Robertson's dark An Sgaireag: She Screams, and Misha Mullov-Abbado's more folksong-like The Linden Tree.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the evening is the way in which the lines are blurred between original works and arrangements, not least because the four musicians pay so much attention to the possibilities of manipulating timbre by straying into each other's territory to create new tone colours.
The arrangements, all but one by the musicians themselves, are more rewritings than simple transcriptions, and even the earliest music, Barbara Strozzi's agitated Tradimento, first published in 1659, is rich in 21st-century effects and colourings.
With 12 items on the programme, this is one of those evenings when the almost mesmerising whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The art of arranging is alive and well.
Dublin International Chamber Music Festival
continues until Sunday, June 8th
