Colour on all sides
Barra Ó Séaghdha
A review of the recent RTÉ Living Music Festival which focused on jazz and the music of American composer John Adams.
RTÉ Living Music Festival,
Various venues, Dublin, 16-18 February 2007
When RTÉ decided to move the Living Music Festival from the Helix to the city centre and to focus the 2006 festival on the music of Steve Reich, it was rewarded with packed houses and plentiful publicity. The fact that the audience included an unusually high proportion of young people would not have gone unnoticed. In radio terms, Reich is a composer who appeals to both the John Kelly and the Bernard Clarke listenerships. There had been genuine enthusiasm behind the choice of Reich. Whatever the differences between the composers, a good percentage of Reich-lovers are likely to be Adams-lovers too, so we may presume that it was love rather than hard-nosed calculation that lay behind...
