The Sligo New Music Festival and Composers’ Choice.
A week before the Composers’ Choice series began at the National Concert Hall on 5 April, there was another kind of composer’s choice in Sligo: Ian Wilson, the festival director, had chosen to centre this year’s Sligo New Music Festival on the music of the German-based British composer Rebecca Saunders. Anyone who had heard the Kairos CD that carries her name, or who had heard broadcasts of her work, would know that Saunders is an intensely committed composer who manages to make heart-stopping drama out of minutely researched explorations of sound.
Playing around with the innards of the piano, putting highpitched whistling together with belching brass – this kind of thing is no longer inherently interesting or surprising or shocking, having become...