Reviews

Irish Times writers review the latest offerings from the arts world.

Callino & Friends Bantry House, Co Cork

Last week's Dublin performance of Morton Feldman's marathon Second String Quartet was not the only Good Friday celebration of an unusually extended string quartet. Down in Bantry the Callino Quartet tackled Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, to open a weekend of concerts under the heading Callino & Friends.

The series brought the Callinos back to the scene of their first triumph (the group was formed at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in 1999) and focused on three composers whose anniversaries are being marked this year: Mozart, who's been getting the lion's share of attention, Shostakovich, who's been coming in an honourable second, and Schumann, who has lagged in a rather distant third place.

It's been said of Mozart that when people are young they like his music because it's so immediately pretty, that when they're slightly older they despise it for the same reason, and that when they're mature they appreciate it for the complexity and depth their earlier attitudes missed out on. And for performers of any age or stage, it's a lot easier to master the notes than to suggest the layers of feeling that the music encompasses.

The Callinos' performance of the famous Dissonance Quartet (the nickname coming from the harmonic complications of the work's slow introduction) dealt neatly and agreeably with the music's surface. But the piece was given little time to breathe. This was not so much a matter of actual tempo, but rather of a style of delivery which engaged in the musical equivalent of reading over full stops. The approach paid off best in the busy passagework of the finale.

By contrast, the Callinos' pseudo-orchestral brightness and brio in the Piano Concerto in C, K415, seemed spot on. This is a dual-purpose piece. It's a full concerto when performed with orchestral wind and strings, but was designed to become a chamber work when played by piano and string quartet. Saturday's pianist Maria McGarry chose not to embrace the chamber music idea, and handled the piece in a way that was out of scale even with the orchestral manner of the Callinos.

McGarry gave the series' two Schumann performances, Papillons and Carnaval, both sequences of character pieces in the composer's inimitable, fantasy-rich manner, reflections, he said, of a turbulent inner life, written at a time "when man and musician always strove to express themselves simultaneously".

Her performances were flighty in the extreme, with a use of rubato that came to seem self-defeating. If you're going to pull the time and shape around a lot, it's essential to maintain a strong grasp of the background so that the manipulations of the foreground have a context to be viewed against.

Her idiosyncratic inclinations were further evidenced in performances of Beethoven's Ghost Trio (with the Callinos' second violinist, Sarah Sexton, and cellist, Sarah McMahon), and in Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, where she chose a relationship with the strings that was often more competitive than collaborative. The Shostakovich quintet, and also the composer's Second String Quartet, tempted the Callinos to cross the line in their search for expressive intensity. They treated the music's passages of heightened emotion as unreconstructed expressionism, an approach which wrongfoots the composer's dalliance with dangerously banal melodic material. Shostakovich was working at an angle, and a straightforward, gung-ho manner tends to leave the music sounding overblown and meretricious.

Their approach was altogether more successful when Shostakovich was working with obvious restraint, and when they responded to his moments of inwardness with a pared-back tone, drained of vibrato, the results were exceptionally fine. For most performers, the music of Mozart is rather more robust than that of Haydn. But the Callinos found a sharper focus in Haydn's Sunrise Quartet (Op 76 No 4) than they had in Mozart's Dissonance. Haydn reveals the nuts and bolts of his thinking rather more obviously than Mozart, and the Callinos took to the music's outgoing spirit with obvious relish.

The finest Mozart playing of the weekend came on the last day, when the Callinos teamed up with the New York-based Irish clarinettist Carol McGonnell for the Clarinet Quintet. It was an unusual performance, with an upbeat perkiness from the clarinet which devolved most of the work's melancholic undertow to the strings, a redistribution which was carried off with ease.

The finest music-making I heard all weekend, however, came in Saturday's late-night concert, devoted to just a single work, Arnold Schoenberg's early Verklärte Nacht. An early objector to this piece said it sounded "as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet!" But audiences have long since warmed to the sensuous indulgence and heady harmonic explorations of this at times almost overpowering string sextet. Saturday's performance, with Cian Ó Dúill (viola) and Christopher Marwood (cello) as the extra players, had just the right mixture of controlled musical sweep and unstoppable passion.

Michael Dervan

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Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Whelan's, Dublin

They say that dog owners often look like their canine pets, but perhaps a similar theory could be put forward about musicians and their songs -Michael Jackson looking progressively more unnatural as his music lost all its soul, while David Bowie's cut-glass features are a perfect fit for his angular songs . . . the list goes on. There is unlikely to be a singer, however, who is more perfectly a physical incarnation of his music than Will Oldham, aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy.

With his large dome head, bushy beard, deep-set eyes and occasional facial tics, the Louisville, Kentucky native looks like his cracked vocals and powerful folk music made flesh. And similar to his songs, which can initially appear difficult or obtuse before finding their way into your head and heart, Oldham here revealed himself to be a compelling, magnetic performer.

This performance, a presentation by the music magazine Foggy Notions (essential reading for anyone serious about their music), began with a lively performance by Scottish/Irish trad quintet Harem Scarem, all flutes and fiddles dancing on the small Whelan's stage.

After their lively showcase, Oldham appeared, taking up position on stage left, rather than occupying centre stage. He played a few songs by himself at first, his gently plucked guitar and distinctive vocals demonstrating the simplicity that lies at the heart of his music. He was then joined by a drummer for a few more songs, adding a layer to his sound, before Harem Scarem returned to fill up the stage and fill out Oldham's sound. In this respect, the performance mimicked the structure of many of Oldham's songs, simple sparseness allowing room for more and more intricate playing.

The setlist contained a good selection from Oldham's back catalogue, including Arise, Therefore, from the days when he went by the Palace soubriquet; a mesmerising My Home is the Sea, from last year's wonderful Superwolf collaboration with Matt Sweeney; a powerful rendition of Master and Everyone; and finally a fitting I See a Darkness. The audience, though, had seen the truth - Bonnie "Prince" Billy is simply one of America's most vital songwriters.

Davin O'Dwyer