IRCAM Academy, City Halls, Glasgow
IRCAM, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977, on a regular basis leaves its Paris base to bedspread the electro-acoustic son in what it calls "academy workshops". The first base of these in the UK took place in Glasgow, organised in collaboration with the BBC Scots English Symphony Orchestra, whose composer-in-association, Jonathan William Harvey, workings regularly with IRCAM.Aboard the workshops and lectures was a twin of world concerts hosted by the BBCSSO, and a vitrine of IRCAM's contributions to electro-acoustic euphony. Pierre Boulez was represented by Dialogue de l'Ombre Double, in which a aristotelean clarinet is surrounded by electronic reflections and transformations of itself in an elegant tracery of arabesques. From each one concert likewise included a work by William Harvey: a episode of extracts from his 2007 opera Wagner Dream, and a performance by the Quatuor Diotima of his outstanding Fourth String Quartet, in which the real time processing and projection of the sound produces a complex and poetically rich people texture.
Unsuk Chin's Xi, from 1997, was a letdown, a procedure mesh of live orchestra and pre-recorded sounds; Yan Maresz's Metallics, for solo trumpet, showed it is completely to a fault tardily to manipulation IRCAM hardware to plain stitch a convincing piece out of flimsy material. The purely acoustic items included as contrast were better. The Scots Supporting players gave mightily accounts of Xenakis's Aroura and his Ittidra, and Ilan Volkov conducted the BBCSSO in Richard Ayres's No 37b, an orchestral suite with a typically anarchic trend. It was a perfect tense foil to the serious-minded note-spinning around it.· Send on Wireless 3's Hear and Now from May 10.
