Barry Caffrey Fujieda Guilfoyle Sato Yoshimatsu

Asymmetry -
Apple Seed Dance (Takashi Yoshimatsu)
Dance Suite & Toccata and Feud (Ronan Guilfoyle)
An August Laying to Rest + 4 (Toshinao Sato)
Mouvement Circulaire et Croisé II + 2 (Akira Miyoshi)
Triorchic Blues + 1 (Gerald Barry)
Un souvenir qu'on va chérir + 5 (Greg Caffrey) )
pattern C + 1 (Mamoru Fujieda)

Izumi Kimura pianist

DIACDSOL003 CD Contemporary Music Centre (Ireland's national archive and resource centre for new music)

Diatribe Solo Series I is a 4-CD set with individual records by pianists Isabelle O’Connell and Izumi Kimura; clarinetist Paul Roe and guitarist and bass player Simon Jermyn. It was launched in April but has not achieved reviews (on the internet) yet?

The boxed set had been in the reviewing queue for some time, but after a surfeit of high romanticism (Szymanowski's 3rd symphony !) by chance, and serendipitously as it turned out, I put on Kimura's cool choices (with a slant towards minimalism and beyond - which is not always to my taste) and it had a palate clearing effect.

Hers is a good disc, with a fair amount of contrast, and graced by two quirky items of Gerald Barry, long a favourite of ours. Main criticism, lack of track timings until you put it into your CD player, nor any total time !

That will deter broadcasters, and it applies to Simon Jermyn's disc too, which carries nothing but 10 inscrutable track titles and with music less likely to appeal to Musical Pointers readers than the others, all of which I have spent time with and have been glad to have done so...

Paul Roe (with collaborators including the eminent Harry Sparnaay) draws on his wide experience in England, Belgium & New York and his is a good survey of contemporary writing for clarinets. Isabelle O’Connell presents a conspectus of Irish piano writing. Presentation of some of the discs apart, they are all well conceived and recorded, and worth exploration; for fuller information go to Contemporary Music Centre Ireland.

Peter Grahame Woolf

Hear interviews & samples at diatribe-solo-series-launch