PING

Steph Power | Wales Art Review, 05.04.13

(...) First on the programme tonight came a piece demonstrating MTW’s continued remit to explore new work; the UK premiere of Ping (2011) by the Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça, (...) a serious and highly capable composer of great promise. The two works (Eight Songs for a Mad King and Ping) made an excellent pair and a fascinating bridge across the generations, showing complementary yet diverse approaches to the worlds of music theatre, language and performance. (...)

The piece was beautifully staged and exceptionally well executed, making the most of an ideal theatrical and acoustical space. In this production, director Michael McCarthy chose to split the solo part between two performers to great effect, with a singer (Helen-Jane Howells in clear, pure voice) ‘ghosting’ the actor/narrator (an equally impressive Nia Roberts) from behind a semi-opaque gauze curtain onto which was projected Aguilar’s flickering black and white patterns. This latter worked with the diffused electronic sounds to create a feeling of internal white noise or static entirely pertinent to the flux of Beckett’s short, repeated phrases and fractured syntax. Also visible behind the gauze were the ensemble of two clarinets, violin, ‘cello and percussion (conducted by Michael Rafferty) from whom emanated music of exquisite lightness and textural plasticity which sought not to ‘interpret’ or ‘enhance’ the Beckett, but rather paralleled its emotional resonances in the most subtle way – in co-witness with the audience, as it were, to the protagonist’s increasingly frustrated recycling of episodic memories.