Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives in New York, apparently, and his bulging eyes goggle out from Gerald Barry’s programme note for his new Organ Concerto. Check him out: the Guardian published the full note a day before the performance, which is only right because a Gerald Barry world première really ought to be national news. ‘I saw a photograph of him with a book called Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,’ explains Barry. ‘By his expression I knew he was mourning the loss of atonality.’
There’s heaps more like that. Some of it offers a genuine insight into Barry’s new concerto — his boyhood experiences with a wheezing church harmonium in rural County Clare, embodied here in a harrumphing harmonium solo; and the way the chime of the Angelus would silence the daily routine just as it opens out a sudden, pregnant gap in the centre of the music. But there’s plenty that reeks of red herring. Barry just isn’t the sort of composer to admit that a cadenza for 21 metronomes embedded in the orchestra is a homage to Ligeti’s Poème symphonique, though he probably would concede that he takes a goofy, childish delight in starting a scale at the bottom of the double basses, then running it up through the orchestra to the piccolo, where the organ tops it off at bat-squeak frequency.
You either love this stuff, or find it intolerably arch. ‘Gerald Barry hates music!’ declared a colleague of mine once. Personally I suspect that Barry’s achievement — harder won than he’d let you think — is to love music at a more instinctive level than many of us can really credit.
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