Reviews

Irish Times writers review the music of Shaun Davey at the National Concert Hall and a performance by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet at the West Cork Music Festival in Bantry.

The music of Shaun Davey - big tunes and anthems - National Concert Hall

Shaun Davey's trepidation was palpable as the opening chords were sounded by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra last Friday night.

After a bumpy start, when Liam Ó Floinn's pipes seemed afraid to inhale to the full depth of its bellows, the entire concert hall set sail from a musically evocative Brandon Creek, as Liam Ó Floinn's pipes navigated the whirlpools of Mykines Sound and Journey To Iceland.

The discrepancies between the determined solitude of the pipes and the essential sociability of the orchestral setting merely underscored the intricacies of the itinerary, as it lured a packed hall of punters in its wake, Ó Floinn's pipes coaxing a pathway through a landscape etched with verve by lead violinist Alan Smale.

Newfoundland offered a suitably epic finale to what was a triumphant opening salvo from Davey. The composer presided over the second part of the evening's programme with the rapt attention of an obstetrician in a delivery room. It was then that we fully appreciated the suitability of the uilleann pipes to a concert hall setting, their subtle tones fingering every nook and crevice of its expanse, rising to a crescendo in the magnificent Pilgrim's Sunrise when uilleann pipes fenced effortlessly with Galician gaita player, Edelmiro Fernández Parada.

To these ears, the bagpipes were still a challenge to accommodate, their biliousness at odds with the finesse of their Irish and Galician counterparts.

Rita Connolly's voice soared on Farewell To Nantes and Séamus Begley reinvented The Parting Glass, while Nollaig Casey coloured and shaded with her customary elegance.

Noel Eccles's percussion arrangements imposed a formidable structure, while the Guinness Choir and Tallaght Choral Society lent a glorious vocal scaffold. - Siobhán Long

Piekutowska, T'ang Quartet, Praák Quartet, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet - West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry

Krzysztof Penderecki - Cadenza. Schulhoff - Quartet No 1.

Novák - Quartet No 2.

Shostakovich - Quartet No 10.

The opening concert of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Saturday was an all-string affair.

Polish violinist Patrycja Piekutowska got things off to a high-voltage start with a work by her compatriot, Krzysztof Penderecki, his Cadenza of 1984, originally written for viola, and later transcribed for violin by Christiane Edinger.

Penderecki was rather better known in the Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a celebrated avant-gardist, and he's been only thinly represented here since his rebirth as a romantic. His Cadenza delivers everything its title would lead you to expect, and Piekutowska played it with the kind of technical and emotional licence the title implies.

Ervin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was one of those unfortunate composers of what the Nazis chose to call Entartete Musik (degenerate music), and he died of tuberculosis in the concentration camp at Wülzburg.

Earlier, in the dizzying decade of the 1920s, he was a modishly polyglot character, stimulated by Dada (one of his piano pieces includes a totally silent movement to be played "with feeling"), left- wing politics (he later famously set Marx's Communist Manifesto to music), and popular culture, as well as the cutting edge of contemporary composition.

Schulhoff's First Quartet of 1924 takes naive-sounding, folksy material and brings it up to the minute with fantastical colouring and daring technical effects, to create a mostly exuberant effect of bad-boy cheekiness.

The T'ang Quartet revelled in its every twist and turn. The players' rhythmic delivery was exceptionally tight and sharp, and their command of timbre and internal balance seemed ideal for the task in hand.

The music sounded as fresh as if it had been written yesterday.

Vitezslav Novák, a pupil of Dvorák, was an almost exact contemporary of Schoenberg , though you'd never guess it from his Second Quartet of 1905, a rather soupily over-written piece of clotted nostalgia which seems to take far too long for far too little to happen.

The Praák Quartet gave it their all, but even the impassioned beauty of their playing on this occasion failed to bring the piece fully to life.

The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet ended the concert with Shostakovich's Tenth Quartet of 1964. It was an uneasy, fitful, sometimes even dried-out sounding performance of a work which often outdoes Schulhoff's First for simplicity of surface.

The rough edges of the second movement went for little, and it was not until the slow passacaglia of the third that things began to gell. Unfortunately, the return of earlier material in the long finale was again unsettling.

This was not one of the Vanbrugh's better nights. - Michael Dervan