Ailís Ní Ríain The Last Time I Died*; Soberado**; Parambassis†; Revelling/Reckoning†† etc. †Paul Roe (bass clarinet), †Laoise O’Brien (recorder), ††Evelyn Glennie, Tim Williams (percussion), **Xenia Pestova Bennett (toy piano) et al.; *Psappha; ††New London Chamber Ensemble/Darren Bloom NMC NMCD270 66:47 mins
Perhaps starting one’s latest recording with a composition for toy piano is something of a statement, but it’s a joyous one at that. How could it not be? Many composers have written for toy piano, not least John Cage, but there is something about Ailís Ní Ríain’s baldly earnest Soberado, that seems to embody both the tinny ridiculousness and the instrument’s own tiny, reproduction-piano pride. It has character, you’d say, as it is played here with absolute precision and commitment by Xenia Pestova Bennett.
There’s more in similar vein in the later Parambassis, a to-and-fro for bass clarinet and recorder inspired by the see-through glass fish. In the conversational midst, the quality of sound is entirely unselfconscious.
This album presents not just miniatures inspired by the visual and internal world, although the conversion of sight to sound is of huge importance for Ní Ríain as a deaf/hearing-impaired composer and writer. These are descriptive conversations in instrument, with a fascinating interest in marrying sounds and resonances, unusual yet instructive, from pre-recorded piano to cimbalon and bass flute. Ní Ríain counters sound against sound, weighing up the qualities of bass clarinet and recorder, or pre-recorded altered piano and violin. There is the otherworldly audio picture of Seahorse (long-snouted) and then in converse the driven Revelling/Reckoning, an extended two-part work for chamber ensemble and percussion – here Evelyn Glennie and the New London Chamber Ensemble, in an excellent playing of the work.
Sarah Urwin Jones
