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Fidelio Trio(Mode)The enchanting, funny, infuriating style that has made the Irish composer’s operas so successful shines through in these smaller-scale works“Gerald Barry is always sober,” Mauricio Kagel once said of his former pupil, “but might as well always be drunk”. That sums up the Irishman’s music perfectly: it can be enchanting, exhilarating, wildly funny, frighteningly violent or downright infuriating, sometimes all at the same time. It’s a mixture that has made Barry’s operas, especially The Importance of Being Earnest and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, so successful. But that same anarchic unpredictability has always come through in his smaller-scale works, too, as this collection from the members of the Fidelio Trio – violinist Darragh Morgan, cellist Adi Tai and pianist Mary Dullea – demonstrates.The earliest piece here dates from 1979, when Barry was using symbols as titles for his music; the austere Ø is a piano quartet, which began life as an exercise in ornamentation and coordination for two pianos. The most recent is All Day at Home Busy with my Own Affairs, a three-minute piano piece from 2015, which Barry himself plays on the disc, and is based on music from his yet-to-be-performed Salome opera. The longest piece here is 1998, for violin and piano, in which the abrupt exchanges between the two instruments gradually attain some kind of continuity. The shortest, also for violin and piano, are the miniatures, each less than a minute long, that make up Baroness von Ritkart (named after a character in Chekhov). Continue reading...