A CD of hitherto unreleased recordings of Gerald Barry's music will appear in January 2010. It comes free with Boulevard Magenta 2, a biannual magazine of arts and letters published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Boulevard Magenta, echoing early international avant-garde magazines, focuses on art practice without excluding any discipline. It is available from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and from museum and art bookshops.

The CD has four works by Barry, Things That Gain By Being Painted (1977) for soprano, speaker, cello and piano, Kitty Lie Over Across From The Wall (1977) for piano and orchestra, L'Agitation des Observateurs, le Tremblement des Voyeurs (2002) for ensemble, and Chevaux de frise (1987-88) for orchestra.

The two earliest works comes from Barry's period in Cologne and Vienna, and he regards Things That Gain By Being Painted as his Opus 1, what The Telegraph called a "real discovery, full of teasing humour and impeccable in its comic timing of word and musical gesture."

Kitty Lie Over Across From The Wall is a strange kind of piano concerto. Barry writes that "The title is slightly unhinge-making. It refers to an Irish song called Kitty Lie Over Close To The Wall. I can't remember why I opted for 'across from' as opposed to 'close to'. I think I thought that her lying 'over across from' was a little disturbing in some intangible way, and 'over close to' was more managable in ones head - so I opted for the former. I remember Kagel saying, "You can't call it that. It's too weird!"

The music itself consists of two virtuosic piano solos and one appearance of the orchestra. The piano music was meant to echo the mayhem of bells from Cologne churches on Sundays, making sleep impossible. The orchestra appears like a great dinosaur looking over a parapet, and then disappearing.

L'Agitation des Observateurs, le Tremblement des Voyeurs is a hymn to voyeurs, the stillness and devotion needed in such a discipline.

Chevaux de frise was written for the 1988 Proms. The Financial Times wrote of it: "The orchestral scoring is bold and raw, the level of dissonance high, and the motor energy of the music unstoppable...a careering rhythmic unison which gathers pace and aggression as it goes, changing gear in brusque dislocations until it erupts into a strident transcription of an Elizabethan song and ends as abruptly as it began...an unsettling and exhilarating piece."

Boulevard Magenta 2 will also have ten pages of sketches from Barry's opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, plus photographs from the productions at ENO and Basle.

Posted: 14 December 2009