Cork Midsummer Festival: Ecclesiastes brings something new under the sun

To hear the libretto for John O’Brien’s Ecclesiastes is to recall the late Bernard Levin’s reminder that we are always talking Shakespeare. Delivered from the page by Derbhle Crotty, the ancient words from the Old Testament have the same familiarity of custom, although she renders the lines of “for everything there is a season” with an emphasis unlikely to be heard at funerals.

Trousered and vested like a female CEO of an IT company, Crotty employs an ennui of daunting vacuity; she’s in control but couldn’t care less. It is her absence of empathy which brings the music into bold relief and establishes O’Brien’s score more as argument than commentary. Commissioned by the Cork Midsummer Festival, Ecclesiastes has the importance of work that will travel, for this quartet is no secondary element, but has a resonance, especially in some warm writing for the viola, which is integral to the performance as an entire work.

The Carducci String Quartet consists of Matthew Denton, Michelle Fleming, Eoin Schmidt-Martin and Emma Denton, and this performance, in its freshness and agility, its response to mood and coherence and, above all, timing, ensures the crucial flow of communication between words and music. Small pauses suggest a structure of movements, but the necessary organisation of composition is implied rather than adamant and much of the writing seems shaped to give each instrument passages of disciplined pleasure both in the playing and the hearing. Occasionally, the Triskel being a relatively small venue, one can see the musicians smiling.

Without diluting the professionalism of the performance, this appeals hugely to an audience already engaged by the weary tone of Crotty’s own phrasing. She has a way of being absent even when alert and dominant. The questions within O’Brien’s interrogation of this old preacher’s philosophy imply inertia: it’s all too much, why bother when it’s all pointless? O’Brien provides a text but we’ve already grasped from Crotty that this isn’t the King James Version. However, the questions remain: why search for wisdom when the more knowledge brings the more suffering; why those who watch the wind will never sow and those who keep looking at the clouds will never reap; why, when the evil days will come and the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, it is after all better to eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart for there is nothing new under the sun?