Reviews

Irish Times critics review performances including: The Beckett Project at the Granary Theatre, Cork; Our Lady's Choral Society with the RTÉCO under Proinnsías Ó Duinn; the Ulster Orchestra under Thierry Fischer in Belfast and Ellika and Solo at Liberty Hall, Dublin

The Beckett Project at the Granary Theatre, Cork

Nothing is left to tell, and yet with Beckett everything is left to tell. The three pieces making up the first programme of The Beckett Project explore the telling process itself, beginning with Ohio Impromptu, in which one player reads from a book that ends with the words that there is nothing left to tell, the other player conducting the spoken sequences with a single fluent hand. In this short piece the tale and the telling merge not only through voice but also by the draped hair, the bravado of a hat, the actors' pose and the contained lighting. Expertise of this subtlety activates the contrasts so significant in any reading of Beckett's work.

The livelier, and vocally demanding, Play, in which three characters captured in Ali Baba-type urns reveal, twice and at machine-gun speed, the immediate details of an adulterous affair, has its comic moments, accurately flashed like unspoken and forbidden thoughts. There is no fun at all, however, in Eh Joe, produced for television, in which the actor responds to the voice of his life as he sits like a recluse or a refugee in his white box of a room. Even though the world has been shut out the inner voice remains implacable and ineradicable.

Predictably, the depressive element so integral to this playwright cannot be diminished, but the sophisticated presentation here is the result not merely of years of specialisation by Phillip Zarrilli and Patricia Boyette, who devised the project, but also of the work of the small local team with which they have trained over the past five weeks. Regina Crowley, Andy Crook, Bernie Cronin and Erinbell Fanore were effectively involved in the first programme, to which was added the technical skill paramount in productions of this stature.
Mary Leland

Runs until Saturday

Our Lady's Choral Society, RTÉCO/Proinnsías Ó Duinn
at the National Concert Hall, Dublin

^{Dvorák - Requiem}

George Bernard Shaw was unequivocal about Dvorák's Requiem, whose première - conducted by the composer - he attended at the Birmingham Festival in 1891. The piece "bored Birmingham so desperately", he reported, "that it was unanimously voted a work of extraordinary depth and impressiveness". Sunday night's performance by Our Lady's Choral Society and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra was not boring. Conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn chose generally quick, fluid tempos and consistently drew lightness and clarity of orchestral texture from his players.

This approach avoided the piling on of any surplus interpretive romanticism and allowed the direct, very 19th-century emotional appeal of Dvorák's score to speak for itself.

The work, seldom performed here, reveals many influences. Mozart can be heard in moments of high drama, the orchestration owes an amount to Brahms, and Dvorák's involvement in both opera and folk music is often evident. The dark opening motif, which reappears at intervals throughout the work, is reminiscent - both in its sound and in its unifying function - of the "fate" motto in Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, first performed in 1878.

The rarity of performances likely has less to do with verdicts such as Shaw's than with the steep challenges facing the choir. In particular on this occasion, Dvorák's ever-changing chromatic harmonies often strained intonation. The men were especially prone, even with discreet, surreptitious support from the organ in a cappella passages.

Happily, the concluding Agnus Dei - the gemstone of the piece - was among those more secure sections in which the choir's freshness and responsiveness were heard to best advantage.

The baroque-tinted transparency and understatement of soprano Lynda Lee stood out from the quartet of soloists, which also included contralto Deirdre Cooling-Nolan, tenor and relative newcomer Paul Byrom and bass Gerard O'Connor.

Michael Dungan

Ulster Orchestra/Thierry Fischer
at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast

^{Dvorák - Carnival Overture
Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 2
Shostakovich - Symphony No 5}

There is always a sense of occasion in the last concert of the Ulster Orchestra's subscription series, and there was no lack of excitement in the performance of the Dvorák overture, the last of the orchestra's tributes to the composer in his centenary year.

Fischer conducted a performance that was both spirited and accurate, the coda especially being played with plenty of zest. But although he kept the Dvorák firmly in tempo, Fischer was more flexible and searching in the Rachmaninov - for example, at the end of the first movement, where he revelled in the warm tone of the lower strings. Louis Lortie's playing of the opening chords promised a poetic insight that was realised not so much where one might have expected it, in the slow movement, as in an unusually thoughtful finale.

There was much to enjoy in the performance of the Shostakovich: the intense, grainy string tone in the first movement, some epic timpani-playing in the finale, and the sense of anger without which any performance of this composer's works is destined to failure, which showed in the gruff lower strings at the start of the second movement.

In the first and third movements Fischer conveyed a sense of space while keeping the music on the move. The coda, taken with remorseless and insistent steadiness, was powerful, but when monumentalised like this it can seem detached from the rest of the movement (Shostakovich does not ask for an exaggeratedly slow tempo).

Rachmaninov's Vocalise made an attractive encore.

Dermot Gault

Ellika and Solo at Liberty Hall, Dublin

Their arrival was heralded by a slow-burning, almost subterranean whisper. Somehow the prospect of a Senegalese and Swedish pairing didn't quite send ripples across the imagination in the same way that some previous guests of the Improvised Music Company's Routes In Rhythm series had. Ellika Frisell and Solo Cissokho promised a partnership in violin and kora, but what else? Their opening set of tunes failed to ignite. Frisell's violin traced scratchy lines alongside Cissokho's infinitely more complex 22-stringed kora. It was as if a Morris Minor was attempting to keep pace with a Lexus. But then, as soon as the triple time of Takissaba lurched forth, followed by Frisell's Swedish polka, all seemed right in the world again. Now Frisell's violin lent an almost baroque quality to Solo's florid kora, the two instruments not so much jousting as bantering with one another.

Cissokho's style is all heart and full of belly laughs. His vocals reach way low, beyond the place where the boredom threshold of most Western listeners stretches. Anyone reared on the back of maudlin balladry or the limited octave range of pop found their eardrums shimmying to the delights of his singing, which seemed to wrestle first with his solar plexus and then, belatedly, with his larynx. Oddly, Frisell's violin thrived largely in the company of Cissokho's Senegalese material, its wide-open spaces affording her far greater space to flex her muscles than the more restrained Swedish tunes.

Altan's Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Dermot Byrne loped onstage, a touch apprehensively, despite their experience of playing with the pair last year. After a short sally through a set list that included the superb set of reels featuring Tommy Peoples, Loch Altan and The Moving Bog, the four set about swapping tunes with variable enthusiasm. They kick-started their short ensemble with Tommy Potts's The Butterfly, Frisell bringing a twinned Swedish piece to the table that nipped and tucked Potts's more effusive flourishes between its hemlines. It was as if Frisell's version was a narrow-gauge railway coaxing Ní Mhaonaigh's flightier version to travel between its corseted tracks, and somehow it worked magnificently. Of course, Dermot Byrne's deliciously traced counter melodies did much to push them beyond the speed limit.

And from there they traced a pathway through Frisell's The Happiness Waltz, alongside Cissokho's Soum Soum, Ní Mhaonaigh and Byrne supremely comfortable straddling these new-found longitudes. It had all the promise of things to come, and tunes to soar higher, with a little more time together in rehearsals.

Siobhán Long