Reviews

Irish Times writers review a selection of events.

Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill and the West Ocean String Quartet, Diversions, Meeting House Square, Dublin

Cellist, composer and man of sound humour Neil Martin suggested that a night of turbulent weather was only what was to be expected, given the emotional tumult of his newly composed Oileán Na Marbh. That might have been so, but the unseasonal rain was an unwelcome distraction to many an eardrum. Meeting House Square might have been the ideal setting for Martin's world premiere on any other night of the week, but sodden feet and damp posteriors don't quite lend themselves to a hearty night's listening, despite best efforts.

The West Ocean String Quartet have championed their own particular hybrid of the classical and traditional, challenging both genres while at the same time luring punters to cross what might once have been seen as an unbridgeable divide.

Theirs is a bold repertoire that fingers slow airs, jigs, reels and polkas with equal ease, unpicking them to their skeleton and then sheathing them in a new layer of skin, with strings often replacing the more familiar reeds of box and pipes.

They triumphed on Martin's own compositions, with A Space For Dreaming (inspired by photographs beamed from the doomed Columbia space shuttle) casting an entirely new light on the way in which music can act as both commentary and reflection on life's fragile passing.

Premiering a song cycle inspired by a Co Donegal burial ground for unbaptised infants, the West Ocean String Quartet gelled divinely with Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill, who tackled the dense lyricism of poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh with a mixture of delight and undoubted trepidation.

Ní Dhomhnaill's vocals dipped and soared in concert with the arrangements, though at times it was evident that she hadn't quite reached the comfort zone with the material that a live performance demands. It was at times forbidding, and suitably foreboding, but somehow the setting did little to cradle such a demanding and challenging music. Another chance to hear it without the interference of street sirens would be a welcome one. - Siobhán Long

Bernard Winsemius (organ). St Michael's Church, Dún Laoghaire

With Sunday's recital in the country's longest-running international organ series, the eminent Dutch organist Bernard Winsemius made a long-awaited Irish debut.

His programme was framed by Bruhns's Prelude in E minor - where the fugal sections flowed with impeccably integrated ornamentation - and Bach's Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C,

BWV 564, parts of which were more deliberately pointed but which brought things to a congenially understated conclusion. In both pieces, Winsemius applied a fluid touch to much of the passage-work, its patterns dissolving into a general effervescence.

Bach, who made several organ arrangements of Italianate concertos by other composers, got a taste of his own medicine with Winsemius's adaptation of the harpsichord concerto in D, BWV 1054.

The central adagio's dramatic obbligato provided an opportunity for some arresting delivery. Transferred from strings to pipes, however, the rich orchestral textures of the allegros cloyed, and seemed to contain more notes than it was comfortable to play.

Altogether more compelling was the abstruse counterpoint of Bach's chorale prelude, Vater unser in Himmelreich, BWV 682. Here, at a measured but forthright andante, Winsemius's power of holding the attention verged on the hypnotic.

It was this instinct for being both natural and interesting at a moderate pace that made his performances of the oldest music of the evening so freshly persuasive.

The four variations on Ich ruf zu dir, herr Jesu Christ, by Sweelinck, and some 17th-century versets on Dutch songs by a certain Joseph Butler, were vividly registered, gracefully phrased, and artfully paragraphed. - Andrew Johnstone

Johnson, ConTempo String Quartet, Castletown House, Celbridge

Mozart - Clarinet Quintet.

Tchaikovsky/Takemitsu - Autumn Song.

Weber -Clarinet Quintet.

The English clarinettist, Emma Johnson, chose to give spoken introductions to each of the three works on the programme for her IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses appearance with the ConTempo Quartet last weekend. She spoke with the easy authority of a born communicator, and that's how she played the music too.

The clarinet quintets of Mozart and Weber are a useful foil to one another in programmes for clarinet and string quartet. Mozart conceived the five players as a blended ensemble, Weber produced something more on the lines of a chamber music concerto, with the clarinettist as the soloist. It's not that there is a total absence of brilliance in the Mozart. But it's never the main point, as it often is in the Weber.

Johnson played both works with an engaging extroversion of spirit which was more consistently at one with the romantically inclined Weber than the altogether more poised Mozart.

Like the members of the ConTempo Quartet, she gave the impression of living in the moment, of placing a high value on spontaneity, of being willing to take risks which, although they contributed moments of edginess to her tone, also produced some astonishing pianissimos and brought a sense of adventure to these staples of the repertoire.

The one non-staple was the arrangement by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu of a short movement from Tchaikovsky's set of piano pieces, The Seasons. The arrangement was anything but hackneyed, with much use of instrumental doubling to enrich strands of the texture and provide unexpected colouring from the familiar instrumental line-up.

The five musicians played it with as much affection as they did everything else during the evening. - Michael Dervan