National Gallery, Dublin
Johnston, Leonard, McGonnell, Collins

Ian Wilson - The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.

Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time

The text for Belfast-born Ian Wilson's new piece for narrator and chamber ensemble is >from Gabriel García Márquez's short story of the same name.  Those who know the García Márquez story must surely have felt, as I did, that Wilson's music - now watery and pictorial, now expressive of psychological states, now mysterious and abstract - uncannily captured the story's strangely winning mix of the macabre and the beautiful, ending with exactly the warm, weird kind of happiness that the author seems to have intended.

Entirely in tune with the atmosphere was the narrator Gavin Friday, who revealed in his deep, breathy delivery a twinkling appetite for the morbid as well as an appreciation for the positive human outcome of the story.

The occasion provided an extra pleasure in bringing together three of Ireland's finest musicians from the one generation: violinist Catherine Leonard, clarinetist Carol McGonnell and pianist Finghin Collins. Together with cellist Guy Johnston they gave alert, lively and spiritually-charged performances of both the Wilson and then Messiaen's heaven-gazing musical escape route from his POW camp in 1941, the Quartet for the End of Time.

Michael Dungan