Reviews

Irish Times writers review Alicia Keys at the Point Depot, Sheryl Crow at the Point and the West Cork Chamber Music Festival at Bantry House in County Cork.

Alicia Keys

Olympia Theatre, Dublin

Peter Crawley

Sheets of rain, a roll of thunder, lightning strikes on cue: a perfect storm is brewing. It envelops the packed Olympia while a piano slowly rumbles from behind the curtain. When both curtain and storm have lifted, the 23-year-old neo-soul sensation Alicia Keys doffs her glittering trilby to the music's sweet ache, bounces to the rhythm of souped-up R&B and gets down with all the wit and verve of hip hop.

Riding on flurries of synths and scalding guitar licks, songs canon into one another exhilaratingly while Keys's voice alternates between a gale-force blast and a summer breeze. There is preposterous fun to be had with the dark histrionics of Karma, which later concertina into the seductive funk of Heartburn. And although classically informed pianists are not renowned for their booty jiggling, Keys shakes it like a Polaroid picture over a capricious snippet of Outkast's Hey Ya!

The fun is infectious but, sadly, unsustainable. So when Keys has drawn an anaemic whimper from the "real men" and a deafening roar from the "real women", hopping up from her grand piano during A Woman's Worth to perform a turbo-charged dance of the seven veils, it's inevitable that the storm must break.

How Come You Don't Call Me limps around for 15 tortuous minutes before If I Ain't Got You revisits the emotional cul-de-sac of 1970s soul. It's a problem that Keys can unlock with show-off theatrics - conducting her band in a bling-emblazoned coat and tails, playing her piano while reclining on its lid or delivering a gloriously overwrought Fallin'.

So intimate is Keys with her music that at times the listener feels left out, unsure why those sudden explosions yield to lingering slow burns and private jokes. That, however, is the consequence of a radiantly light-hearted and natural talent: Alicia just wants to play.

Sheryl Crow

The Point, Dublin

Anna Carey

About three songs into Sheryl Crow's triumphant Point performance a crack begins to show in the impassive facade of one of the security guards standing at the foot of the stage. As the enthusiastic audience lift their arms in the air and clap along he starts nodding his head gently to the beat. After the next song he claps. By the time Crow is rocking her way through A Change Will Do You Good he's playing a bit of surreptitious air guitar. That's how infectious the feel-good spirit of Crow's live show is.

Crow has always been a victim of her own glossiness. She could, and should, be as credible as Aimee Mann. But her slick public persona and even slicker production sound have tended to mask the quality of her folk- and country-tinged rock songs, which have almost always managed to be catchily melodic without being bland.

And as tonight's performance shows, those songs, such as the ultra-poppy Every Day Is A Winding Road and the haunting Home, stand up very well live. As do her raspy voice and gutsy guitar playing. Switching from guitar to bass - and, during the memorable second encore, piano - throughout the show, Crow is a confident musician. She and her four-man band seem to work naturally together, and there's something truly great about seeing a guitar-wielding woman lead a bunch of boys through these old-school country rock-outs.

By the time she's dancing on the piano during the encore she's won every heart in the packed-out Point. It doesn't really matter if she hasn't yet won over the music snobs.

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry House, Co Cork

Michael Dervan

This year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival has been slow to catch fire. Sunday's midday Coffee Concert by the Galliard Ensemble offered a sequence of bonbons for wind quintet. There was rather too much about the programme that was cartoonish, and the cumulative effect was that of a meal of modern music for listeners who don't actually like the stuff. The Galliards included works by Paul Patterson (two pieces), Luis Tinoco and Jacques Ibert. But it was Ferenc Farkas's Ancient Hungarian Dances, although done with a distinct shortage of grace and charm - these players seem rather too fond of primary colours - that provided the greatest rewards.

The Vilnius String Quartet opened their afternoon programme with Open The Gate Of Oblivion, the Second Quartet by their fellow Lithuanian Onute Narbutaite. This work creates the effect of a composer mapping out a territory, testing the possibilities of sequencing and combining small gestures, and willingly embracing the occasionally high levels of discordance that can result.

Bantry House, with its dry acoustic, is an unsympathetic venue to essay Arvo Pärt's atmospheric Fratres, with its prominent use of string harmonics. The Vilnius Quartet's at times strained performance seemed to cry out for a space that would allow the sound to linger a little before disappearing. The group's performance of Janácek's Quartet No 2 (Intimate Letters) was spirited but not always tidy in detail.

Two further string quartets were heard. The festival's quartet in residence, the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, played Jane O'Leary's In The Stillness Of Time, a commissioned work of confident, small-scale impressionism in which the players seemed to have gauged the weight and timing of every moment to perfection. And the St Petersburg Quartet gave an impassioned account of Tchaikovsky's grief-laden Third Quartet, though the group's leader, Alla Aranovskaya, tended to press her case at the expense of her colleagues.

The most impressive performances of the day came in altogether less well-known music. The Altenberg Trio offered Saint-Saëns's Second Piano Trio, a piece that seems almost misshapen, like a plant that's unexpectedly bolted. It's almost as if the composer were somehow unable to contain himself, dealing with a ferment of ideas too rich for him to handle. The pianist Claus-Christian Schuster didn't always keep the detail of the often extravagantly textured piano writing in clear focus. But the spirit was always apt, and the audience clearly enjoyed the unusual and rare journey.

They enjoyed even more, and made no secret of it, the opportunity, so unusual in Ireland, of hearing Russian song from a true Russian bass, Fyodor Kuznetsov. He began his Bantry offerings, as he will continue later in the week, with Shostakovich rarities, the Pushkin Monologues, Op 91, and A Foreword To My Complete Works.

The voice has the amplitude, resonance and, of course, velvet finish that make Russian basses such a particular pleasure. There were some infelicities of intonation in his delivery, and his pianist, Yuri Serov, is not always sufficiently careful with his pedalling. But the potency with which Shostakovich related Pushkin to the darker realities of the mid-20th-century Soviet Union (the work dates from 1952) was vividly communicated.

And the black, Shostakovian wit of the short Foreword was also much appreciated.