Barry reviews

Gerald Barry • Beethoven: Symphonies Nos 7-9 etc

Britten Sinfonia/Thomas Adès (Signum Classics)
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Gerald Barry • Beethoven: Symphonies Nos 4-6, etc

Britten Sinfonia/Thomas Adès, et al (Signum Classics)
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Gerald Barry • Beethoven: Symphonies Nos 1-3, etc

Britten Sinfonia/Thomas Adès (Signum Classics)
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Stephen Richardson performs Barry's Choral Interpretations of Beethoven's Letters

If you’ve heard the chunterings of the bass Lady Bracknell in Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, you’ll have some idea of what to expect here. But only up to a point: Barry is never predictable for long, veering off at alarming tangents, and unfathomable in the way he chooses to set his texts. The two monodramas based on Beethoven’s letters here always avoid the obvious.

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Barry: The Importance of Being

Surely this is not only the best operatic treatment of Oscar Wilde since Strauss’s Salome, but also one of the few absolutely essential operas of the last 20 years. I thought so at its UK stage premiere in the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, and this recording of the Barbican performance which preceded it confirms that impression. Gerald Barry’s acerbic, brass-and-wind dominated Earnest brings out the violence behind the epigrams – not as a subtext but as screaming, explicit expressionism, fully backed up by score injunctions.

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Barry

The Importance of Being Ernest
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Barry: Piano Quartet; Au milieu; Triorchic Blues; Bob; Sextet; Sur les pointes; Swinging Tripes and Trillibubkins; '–––'

There are moments in Gerald Barry’s Piano Quartet that recall Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet. But then everyone cries ‘Stravinsky!’ at some point when pressed to describe a new piece. Actually, the Quartet sounds the most Irish of Barry’s works, and his rhythmic surprises aren’t so much like Stravinsky’s metrical jujitsu as shivers of exhilaration. The earliest ensemble piece, whose title is just a straight line, is the coolest music, like a dogged game in which targeted notes are clues.
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Barry: Things that Gain; String Quartet No. 1; Piano Quartet No. 2

This 46-year-old Irish former pupil of Kagel and Stockhausen has been applying avant-garde and other techniques to familiar materials, making the mix quirkily his own, for some 20 years now. Gerald Barry has been decently served on disc, and the present collection supplements previous recordings well.
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Plakidis, Tanaka, Barry, Volans, Sculthorpe, Hakim, etc

Thalia Myers’s efforts to increase the range of contemporary piano music accessible to amateur and student performers have now resulted in three Spectrum collections, and the latest of them spreads its net wider than ever. The 25 composers brought together here, all of whom responded to Myers’s invitation to compose short pieces are natives of 25 different countries, from Iceland to New Zealand, Mexico to Singapore.
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