Mahler, Weber, Schubert and Strauss at the NCH

And so it came to pass that last night I took the train into Dublin for my first concert of the year 2023 at the National Concert Hall in Dublin which happened to be by the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of guest conductor Carlos Kalmar.

It was an unusual programme in terms of its construction. Often the menu for such concerts begin with a short appetizer but this one started with the first movement of  Gustav Mahler‘s 10th Symphony. The composer died a hundred years ago in 1910 having not actually finished the rest of the symphony, but I gather that he left sufficiently detailed sketches and notes that complete versions have been constructed, but nevertheless the first movement is frequently performed on its own. It’s quintessentially Mahler in many ways, but it’s a strange opening for a symphony because it’s a very long Adagio movement (lasting about 30 minutes). It’s a complex and weighty movement for a full orchestra, rather cryptic in nature but overall with a rather dark tone, far from the usual lollipop to start a concert!

Originally this programme was supposed to feature the Duet Concertino by Richard Strauss but it was announced last week that this would be replaced by the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F Minor by Carl Maria von Weber with the NSO’s principal clarinettist John Finucane. Unusually for a concerto performance, John Finucane was reading a score, which perhaps suggests he stood in at short notice but in any case the performance was very fine. The third movement, a spirited Rondo kicked off by a very jaunty theme, is probably the most familiar piece, but I particularly enjoyed the interplay between clarinet and horns in the slow (2nd movement). John Finucane had brought his fan club with him, and the audience responded warmly.

After the wine break we had Symphony No. 8 in B Minor by Franz Schubert, the famous “Unfinished Symphony”. Somewhat surprisingly, I am pretty sure that I had never heard this piece performed live until this concert.

Schubert apparently wrote the first two wonderful movements of this piece in the space of only eight days in 1822 but then seems to have abandoned it. The composition wasn’t interrupted by his death – he didn’t pass away until 1828 – so it’s a mystery why he didn’t finish it. It wasn’t even discovered until the 1860s. Unlike Mahler 10, we don’t have any idea what the rest of this symphony would have been but the two existing movements are exceptional, not least for the stream of lovely melodies. This work clearly belongs to the same world as the Weber piece (which was composed in 1811) but having one after the other emphasizes the transition from Classical to Romantic, and having Mahler on the same programme contrasts early and late Romantic in a very illuminating way.

The last piece was Music of the Spheres, a waltz by Josef Strauss, the younger brother of the more famous Johan Strauss II. It’s a jolly enough but rather insubstantial piece that seemed rather incongruous to me in this programme, especially at the end as it is the sort of piece one could imagine as an appetizer. It seems to have been decided that something was needed in place of the missing movement(s) of the Schubert Symphony, so perhaps it was meant to play the role of a dessert?

In any case it was an upbeat way to end the concert which was very enjoyable. I then made my way out into the rain to get the train back to Maynooth. For a Friday night, Dublin was very quiet indeed, perhaps because of the inclement weather and/or the post-Christmas lull. The NCH wasn’t full but there was a decent attendance and the performance was warmly appreciated.

P.S. Note that the National Symphony Orchestra is no longer the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra owing to some restructuring. Note also that it is planned to close down the NCH for at least two years for extensive refurbishment. I’m not sure what will happen to the NSO during this period.

A Grim Centenary

Today marks the centenary of the “official” outbreak of the Irish Civil War. Full-scale conflict had been threatening to erupt since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 as many people who had fought so hard for independence were profoundly unhappy that the treaty had not delivered the Republic that was their wish. For example, members of the Dáil Éireann of the “Irish Free State” formed in 1921 still had to swear allegiance to the British Monarchy. Ireland did not formally become a Republic until 1949.

Exhausted by the War of Independence and fearful of British threats should the Treaty fail, a majority of the general population in Ireland accepted its terms, but a sizeable minority were determined in their opposition. In April 1922 anti-Treaty forces seized and occupied the Four Courts in Dublin with the aim of paralyzing the administration of the Free State. On June 22nd 1922 Field Marshal Henry Wilson was assassinated outside his home in London, allegedly by members of the anti-Treaty IRA. British authorities ordered their troops to attack Dublin in response, but the attack didn’t go ahead.

At dawn on 28th June 1922, one hundred years ago today, pro-Treaty forces began bombarding the Four Courts in Dublin with two 18-pounder field guns, borrowed from the British Army, in an attempt to dislodge the anti-Treaty forces. In a week of fighting the Four Courts were destroyed along with many important documents, and an archive going back 1,000 years.

So began a terrible Civil War which lasted almost a year.

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John McLaughlin & The Fourth Dimension

John McLaughlin last night (Picture Credit National Concert Hall)

Last night I went to the National Concert Hall in Dublin for a superb gig by guitarist John McLaughlin with his band The Fourth Dimension. This was the first time I’d seen him live though I have known some of his music on disc, especially two albums he made with Miles Davis in the late Sixties, Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way. Since then John McLaughlin has been consistently regarded as one of the best jazz guitarists ever. He is now eighty years old but apart from the fact that his hair is white you would never guess that. He looks as fit as a fiddle, and last the band played for over 90 minutes without a break.

John McLaughlin (who was born in Doncaster but who referred to Ireland as “the land of my ancestors”) is currently on a European tour and he began his concert last night with a heartfelt expression of his gratitude for being able to perform in person with his band after a gap of over two years. This period has been particularly difficult for Jazz musicians who depend so much on mutual interaction when performing. The first number they played was called Lockdown Blues…

The band The 4th Dimension brings together excellent musicians from different cultures and musical traditions, integrating their all cultural influences in a unique way while at the same time preserving the spontaneity of jazz. The result is hard to classify – there’s definitely more than an echo of McLaughlin’s earlier musical work in jazz/rock fusion, but with diverse elements of world music thrown in. His own musical style is instantly recognizable to anyone who has heard music from his back catalogue, but subtly altered to suit his current band.

Gary Husband (right in the picture), who is from the UK, played keyboards (and drums on a couple of numbers). Ranjit Barot – Indian by birth and living in Mumbai – was the main drummer (sometimes playing together with Husband, hence the two kits in the picture); he also made various vocal contributions. On electric bass (left) was the extraordinarily virtuosic Étienne M’Bappé who is of Senegalese origins. The band played collectively but also in various combinations with and without McLaughlin, who tended to move around the stage generally encouraging and directing the traffic.

It was a fantastic gig with a wide range of musical influences being evidence. I noticed two pieces made famous by Pharaoh Sanders – The Creator has a Master Plan and The Light at the Edge of the World – but there were also numerous references to McLaughlin’s work with Indian musicians.

It was a very enjoyable performance that generated a huge response from the audience. The NCH wasn’t quite full, but it was a good crowd. I think I was in danger of forgetting how much I enjoy watching musicians as well as listening to their music.

So after a break since February 2020 I’ve finally resumed concert-going. It’s not only the musicians who have missed live music! As a matter of fact I’ll be back at the National Concert Hall this very evening after the final day of ITP2022, for a very different concert…

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Save Dublin’s Science Gallery!

Last week Trinity College Dublin decided to close the Science Gallery on Pearse Street owing to losses generated during the pandemic. It would be a terrible shame to lose such an excellent venue and the range of fascinating exhibitions it has hosted. The Irish Government has apparently intervened and a reprieve may be on the way but I think it’s important to demonstrate the strength of feeling about the decision.

There is a piece on RTÉ Brainstorm about the reasons why the Science Gallery should not be closed here.

There is a petition here for you to sign should you so wish. It has so far attracted over 3000 signatures.

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The Summer Solstice 2021

The Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere happens tomorrow, Monday 21st June 2021, at 04:32  Irish Time (03:32 UTC). Among other things, this means that tomorrow is the longest day of the year around these parts.  Usually I post about the Solstices and Equinoxes close to the time that they occur,  and on the same day, but because I don’t want to get up before 4.32am and few would be awake to read it then, I thought I’d do this one in advance.

Sunrise in the Dublin area is about 04:56 local time tomorrow and sunset is at 21:57: the interval between sunrise and sunset will be just about 1s longer on 21st June than today, 20th June, and 5 seconds longer than Tuesday 22nd June. The longest day will last 17 hours and 11 seconds (approximately) so make the most of it – it’s all downhill from now on!

Days will get shorter from tomorrow until the Winter Solstice in December, although this does not mean that sunset will necessarily happen earlier on 22nd  than it does tomorrow. In fact it is a little later. This is because there is a difference between mean solar time (measured by clocks) and apparent solar time (defined by the position of the Sun in the sky), so that a solar day does not always last exactly 24 hours. A description of apparent and mean time was given by Nevil Maskelyne in the Nautical Almanac for 1767:

Apparent Time is that deduced immediately from the Sun, whether from the Observation of his passing the Meridian, or from his observed Rising or Setting. This Time is different from that shewn by Clocks and Watches well regulated at Land, which is called equated or mean Time.

The discrepancy between mean time and apparent time arises because of the Earth’s axial tilt and the fact that it travels around the Sun in an elliptical orbit in which its orbital speed varies with time of year (being faster at perihelion than at aphelion).

Using a rapid calculational tool (Google), I found a table of the local mean times of sunrise and sunset for Dublin around the 2021 summer solstice. This shows that the earliest sunrise was actually on 17th June and the latest sunset is on 24th.

If you plot the position of the Sun in the sky at a fixed time each day from a fixed location on the Earth you get a thing called an analemma, which is a sort of figure-of-eight curve whose shape depends on the observer’s latitude. Here’s a photographic version taken in Edmonton, with photographs of the Sun’s position taken from the same position at the same time on different days over the course of a year:

The summer solstice is the uppermost point on this curve and the winter solstice is at the bottom. The north–south component of the analemma is the Sun’s declination, and the east–west component is the so-called equation of time which quantifies the difference between mean solar time and apparent solar time. This curve can be used to calculate the earliest and/or latest sunrise and/or sunset.

P.S. A bit of light googling revealed to me that if you live in York then your sunrise on 21st June 2021 is at 4.32am, precisely the same time as the Solstice.

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Buttercups and Columbines

I suppose Ranunculus and Aquilegia are technically both weeds but they are adding a bit of colour to my garden at the moment and seem to be thriving in their spot next to the wall so I’ll leave them undisturbed.

I suppose it was inevitable that, the day I finished correcting my examination scripts, the glorious weather would end and it would start raining. Still, the rain is good for the garden. There’s always a burst of new growth after each shower. I wonder what will come up next?

The weather improve for the coming weekend which will be nice. It’s a Bank Holiday next Monday and a significant date for me personally on Friday so I’m hoping to take a break during which some gardening will be on the agenda (weather permitting).

I was also thinking about going into Dublin at some point for the first time in over a year, just for a walk around and maybe to visit the National Gallery again. The stories in the press of big crowds of people drinking outdoors last weekend have put me off a bit, but I dare say I can avoid the likely problem areas. Having been stuck in one place for 15 months (apart from a trip to get vaccinated) I feel I should make the effort to begin some sort of renormalisation.

With the exams over, students are asking what is going to happen with teaching in September. The answer is still that I have no idea, though if there’s a spike in infections due to recent events it will be even less likely that we will be back to normal for the new academic year.

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The Burning of the Custom House

Today is the centenary of a significant event in the War of Independence. On 25th March 1921 about 120 members of the Irish Republican Army mounted an operation in Dublin with the aim of setting fire to the Custom House, a fine 18th Century neoclassical building on the North Side of the River Liffey in central Dublin. They were aided in this task by members of the local Fire Brigade who, being Republican supporters, started by the IRA, did the best they could to spread the flames throughout the building when purportedly trying to put them out.

The destruction of the Custom House was a major propaganda coup for the Republican forces, but in military terms it was disastrous. About two-thirds of the IRA volunteers that took part were captured and five were killed. That meant that the virtual elimination of the fighting capability of the IRA in Dublin. The whole plan was the brainchild of Éamon de Valera, who wanted to stage a large-scale “spectacular” to counter the British propaganda argument that Republican forces – who had previously fought a guerilla war of ambushes and assassinations – were just a gang of criminal thugs. The problem with his plan was that the IRA was vastly outnumbered, especially in Dublin where the British garrison was about 10,000. In practical terms, guerilla warfare was all the IRA could manage with the resources available at this time.

The Custom House raid might have been less of a military disaster had more thought been given to an exit strategy once the fires had started, by somehow securing a route out of the area, but as it was the Republican forces trying to hold a perimeter were quickly surrounded, ran out of ammunition in the ensuing gun battle, and were overwhelmed. But maybe it really did have a big effect on the British authorities. Just a few months later, on 11th July 1921, a truce was signed and the War of Independence came to an end.

There have been many commemorations today, many of them rightly focusing on the loss of civilian life and lots of coverage in the news and other media. Here is an item that was on RTÉ News last night.

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The Winter Solstice 2020

The winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere happens tomorrow, Monday 21st December, at 10.02 Irish Time. Among other things, this means that tomorrow is the shortest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. Days will get steadily longer from then until the Summer Solstice next June.  The longest night – defined by the interval between sunset and sunrise – is tonight and the shortest day – defined by the interval between sunrise and sunset – will be tomorrow. The day tomorrow will be two seconds shorter than today, while the interval between sunrise and sunset on Tuesday 22nd December will be four seconds longer than tomorrow.

This does not, however,  mean that sunrise will happen earlier tomorrow than it did this morning. Actually, sunrise will carry on getting later until the new year, the length of the day nevertheless increasing because sunset occurs later. Sunrise this morning (20th December was at 08.37 Dublin Time while tomorrow it will be at 08.38. Sunset tonight will be at 16.07 and sunset tomorrow will be at 16.08.

These complications arise because there is a difference between mean solar time (measured by clocks) and apparent solar time (defined by the position of the Sun in the sky), so that a solar day does not always last exactly 24 hours. A description of apparent and mean time was given by Nevil Maskelyne in the Nautical Almanac for 1767:

Apparent Time is that deduced immediately from the Sun, whether from the Observation of his passing the Meridian, or from his observed Rising or Setting. This Time is different from that shewn by Clocks and Watches well regulated at Land, which is called equated or mean Time.

The discrepancy between mean time and apparent time arises because of the Earth’s axial tilt and the fact that it travels around the Sun in an elliptical orbit in which its orbital speed varies with time of year (being faster at perihelion than at aphelion).

In fact if you plot the position of the Sun in the sky at a fixed time each day from a fixed location on the Earth you get a thing called an analemma, which is a sort of figure-of-eight shape whose shape depends on the observer’s latitude. Here’s a photographic version taken in Edmonton, with photographs of the Sun’s position taken from the same position at the same time on different days over the course of a year:

The winter solstice is the lowermost point on this curve and the summer solstice is at the top. These two turning points define the time of the solstices much more precisely that the “shortest day” or  “longest night”.

Incidentally, the Tropic of Capricorn is the circle of latitude (about 23.5°, the declination of the Sun at the Winter Solstice) that contains the subsolar point at the December solstice. This is therefore the most southerly latitude on Earth where one can see the Sun directly overhead.

Anyway, the north–south component of the analemma is the Sun’s declination, and the east–west component is the so-called equation of time which quantifies the difference between mean solar time and apparent solar time. This curve can be used to calculate the earliest and/or latest sunrise and/or sunset.

Using a more rapid calculational tool (Google), I found a table of the local mean times of sunrise and sunset for Dublin around the 2020  winter solstice. This shows that tomorrow is indeed the shortest day (with a time between sunrise and sunset of 7 hours 29 minutes and 57 seconds).  The table also shows that sunset already started occurring later in the day from 17th December,  before the winter solstice, and sunrise will continue to happen later  after the solstice, notwithstanding the fact that the interval between sunrise and sunset gets longer from tomorrow onwards.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

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Domhnach na Fola

In the days before lockdown I would often travel past Croke Park on the train from Maynooth into Dublin Connolly station. It’s a magnificent stadium, with a capacity over 80,000, its stands towering up on all sides of the playing field which is used for major sporting events organized by the Gaelic Athletics Association (GAA), chiefly hurling and gaelic football. It’s located quite close to Drumcondra Station, the last stop before Connolly on the way into Dublin. I’ve never actually been inside the ground, and you can’t see much of the interior from the train because of the stands, but I do hope to see a match there one day.

Croke Park looked very different a hundred years ago today, on November 21st 1920 (which was a Sunday).

Croke Park, looking towards Hill 16, taken on the day of November 21st 1920.

Incidentally, the low hill you can see in the background is Hill 16. There’s a story that this was built up using rubble from buildings destroyed during the 1916 Easter Rising, but this seems to be apocryphal.

Anyway, as you can see, there wasn’t much in the way of buildings around the playing field in those days, and not much to give spectators cover if they were trying to flee from gunfire.

A Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary started in Croke Park at 2.45 pm on November 21st. About ten minutes into the game, armed police (including members of the regular Royal Irish Constabulary, Auxiliaries, and some Black and Tans) suddenly arrived at the southern end of the park, panicking some of the spectators who tried to run away. Without warning the police opened fire on the crowd. The first to die was 11 year old William Robinson who was sitting in a tree outside the ground to get a better view. Overall the firing lasted about 90 seconds. Thirteen people were killed outright and another died of his wounds later. Others were injured either by gunfire or in the crush resulting from the panic.

Among the dead was Tipperary’s star player Michael Hogan, who was shot dead on the playing field as he tried to find cover. Information from post-mortems released many years after the event revealed that most of the victims had been shot in the back.

Michael Hogan, star player and Captain for the Tipperary team at Croke Park on Bloody Sunday. He died that day.

The massacre could have been even worse had the British forces at the other end of the ground, who had an armoured car with a machine gun, shown more restraint. The machine gun was fired above the heads of the people running towards this contingent. They didn’t shoot anyone but they did force the crowd back towards the gunfire from the other end of the ground. Had they opened fire at the crowd there would have been a massacre on the scale of Amritsar, where hundreds died.

Witnesses also said that while the security forces let all the Dublin players go, they lined up the entire Tipperary team against a fence and were preparing to shoot them all when a junior officer intervened and ordered them to be released. Tipperary was perceived to be a hotbed of IRA activity. Michael Hogan was in fact a member of the Irish Volunteers.

So what on Earth had happened to trigger this indiscriminate slaughter, on the day known now as Bloody Sunday (Irish: Domhnach na Fola)

The overall context is the Irish War of Independence which started in 1919 and was largely a guerilla campaign waged in rural areas. There had not been large-scale eruptions of violence in Dublin. That changed on November 21st 1920. That morning, members of the Irish Republican Army under the direction of Michael Collins, had carried out an operation across Dublin intended to eliminate the ability of the British forces to gather intelligence on the IRA. Hit squads entered the homes of known or suspected British intelligence operatives across the town and shot them. Fifteen people were killed that morning, including at least two innocent civilians in the process.

The IRA members responsible for the killings on Sunday morning melted away into the city. Once again the police and security services seemed to be fighting an invisible enemy. However, knowing that there was a football match going on that afternoon, and that at least some of those involved with the GAA had strong Republican leanings and may indeed be active IRA members, they decided to search all the spectators at the match of which there were over 10,000. The hope was, presumably, to find in the crowd at least some of those responsible for the morning’s assassinations. Instructions were given that anyone who ran away when the search operation began should be presumed guilty and shot.

News about the morning’s events had spread through Dublin that morning and it was widely anticipated that the British would carry out reprisal killings, probably in their usual indiscriminate fashion they had employed previously. When armed men arrived in vehicles outside the ground, the instinct of many spectators was therefore to run even before the searching began. Nervous and trigger-happy police deployed in a harebrained plan to make the slaughter inevitable. Nobody has ever been brought to justice for the murders at Croke Park.

Later that day two members of the IRA were caught by the security services, taken to Dublin Castle, beaten and then shot under the pretext that they were trying to escape. These killings brought the death toll past thirty. Bloody Sunday indeed.

The events in Croke Park handed a major propaganda victory to the IRA and also sparked an escalation of the violence. Just a week later, at Kilmichael in County Cork, the IRA ambushed two trucks carrying a total of 18 Auxiliaries, killing 17 of them and leaving the other for dead. On December 11th the British burned down a large part of the city of Cork in retaliation against another attack on their forces. And so it went on into 1921 to the point where the British eventually realized that Ireland had become ungovernable (by them) and a process was started that brought about independence (at least for part of Ireland).

As you can imagine there have been many commemorations of the grim events of a century ago. I watched a very interesting documentary on the TV earlier this week and there have been many articles in the newspapers and elsewhere about it, taking different angles. Those I found the most moving were those that dealt with the memory of the innocent lives lost. One very poignant idea was to stage 14 very short plays around Croke Park about each of the victims.

Here is a sort of trailer, featuring the heartbreaking story of Jane Boyle – the only woman to die on Bloody Sunday. Her death was particularly tragic as she was due to marry her fiancé Daniel Byron the following week. The couple went to mass at St Kevin’s Church on Harrington Street on Sunday morning and proceeded to Croke Park afterwards. When the firing started, they fled. In the scramble for safety, Daniel felt Jane’s hand go limp; she had been shot in the back and died instantly. She was buried later that week in her wedding gown.

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A Revolutionary Manhole Cover

I must have walked dozens of times past the above manhole cover on Maynooth University’s North Campus without paying too much attention. Then I noticed a post on Twitter of another such cover in County Kerry, in the thread following which someone mentioned one on Maynooth campus so I thought I’d take a picture of it. They must have been made for the centenary commemorations in 2016. There’s more than a hint of Soviet-style design in the artwork.

The figure depicts Eamon Bulfin raising the flag of Irish Republic above the GPO on Easter Monday 1916, the start of the Easter Rising. After the end of the rising Bulfin was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted and, after being imprisoned in Britain for a time, he was deported to Argentina. He returned to Ireland when the Irish Free State in 1922 where he lived until his death in 1968.

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