This is a very mixed bag – understandably so in that the time-span by composition date is some 20 years. In the late 1970s Gerald Barry’s music was very much that of a freethinking, cosmopolitan pupil of that most constructive of musical anarchists, Mauricio Kagel. By the late 1990s he has rediscovered his Irish roots, and with them a wider emotional range. The seminal Kagel influence has not been forsworn, but Barry’s style has freed itself of other more mainstream twentieth-century associations along the way.
The earliest work, Things That Gain (1977), makes much of extreme contrasts that tend to cancel each other out. By contrast, O (1979) plays with a self-consciously featureless, goal-less line, disdaining any aspirations to ‘melody’ as something well shaped and purposeful. Even in the First String Quartet (1985, revised 1994) the feeling persists that intentional inconsequence is the main principle of design, but by the mid-1980s Barry was working on what is probably his most significant single composition so far, the opera The Intelligence Park. The two offshoots of that work included here – Water Parted and Five Chorales – have all that forceful economy of means and ends on which Barry’s later work has capitalized, and the Chorales deconstruct their parent genre with a particularly bold mixture of seriousness and comedy.
The two most recent compositions are the Piano Quartet No. 2 (1996), a potently unstable synthesis of elements evoking folk-dance as well as more genteel, ‘cultivated’ materials, and Before The Road (1997) in which a quartet of clarinets, sounding at times like a wheezy mechanical organ, go through their assigned routines with great concentration and panache. This whets my appetite for the orchestral piece with the same title, for which these miniatures are preparatory.
These recordings, of excellent performances, were made in a variety of locations, and are generally acceptable, some more so than others. The booklet omits all timings for the 21 tracks, and the disc fails to provide separate tracks for the six short movements of Water Parted.'