Reviews

Irish Times review Colm Carey at Christ Church Cathedral, The Defeat of Roncisvalle at the Pavillion in Dún Laoghaire, Schulte NSO/Markson at the NCH and the Ulster Orchestra - Thierry Fischer at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.

Colm Carey

(organ)

Christ Church Cathedral

Martin Adams

Bach (attrib) - Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV565. Sweelinck - Ballo del Granduca. Leighton - Missa de Gloria (exc). Whitlock - Scherzetto.

Vierne - Symphony No 2.

Twenty years after Kenneth Jones and Co completed a largely new organ in Christ Church Cathedral, the instrument has been comprehensively overhauled. Tonal revisions have been done by the famous Netherlands firm of Flentrop, and the console and stop-management system has been rebuilt by the Lisburn-based Wells-Kennedy Partnership. The most important change is the revoicing of the pipes to suit low wind-pressure. In the esoteric world of the organ, such matters provoke reactions that make the Council of Trent look like a high-school debate, and induce rapture or apoplexy. On the evidence of this inaugural recital, rapture is almost appropriate.

The good quality and physical arrangement of the original pipework suits this treatment. The sound has more character, largely because the revoicing has balanced one of the main tensions of organ building. Individual stops are distinctive, while each group of stops is more homogeneous than before. The tone is more relaxed yet more weighty and the latter is not confined to loud registration.

Colm Carey's programme was well-chosen to display these qualities. In the Scherzetto from Whitlock's Sonata in C minor, his crystal-clear playing on quietly burbling flute choruses was a delight. Two excerpts from Kenneth Leighton's Missa de Gloria showed how the instrument can handle dense and rapidly contrasting textures; and works by Sweelinck and Bach showed how integrated the chorus-work is.

One controversial aspect is that tuning is in an historically based unequal temperament. So hearing the occasional tension in individual notes suit even the 20th-century chromaticism of Vierne's Symphony No 2 was thought-provoking.

The Defeat of Roncisvalle

Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire

Gerry Colgan

The art of puppetry, having languished for many years, is thriving in Sicily today. The medium now accommodates operas and plays as well as children's entertainment. For over a century, the puppeteers have maintained a tradition of staging heroic medieval cycles, based on the wars between Christians and Moors 1,000 years ago. They were once the equivalent of today's TV soaps, with a different episode every night. This performance, from the Figli D'Arte Cuticchio, was one of the more remarkable offerings included in this year's Puppet Festival. It is based on The Song of Roland, and tells the story of how Charlemagne's army, led by Orlando (Roland) is defeated in a battle at Roncisvalle in the Pyrenees.

One's attention is grabbed immediately by the colourful stage, embedded in painted canvases with pictures of knights, palaces and medieval panoply. The Cuticchio family logo is on top, and the stage has backdrops that facilitate instant changes of scene - one of puppetry's great facilities. In this fascinating setting, the play opens with a council meeting of Charlemagne and his knights, the Paladins. Heroism and treachery are both present at this meeting, which leads to the eponymous battle in which the Paladins are destroyed. Orlando is the last to die, blowing his horn until his ears burst. There is then a final scene in which he is raised to paradise. The battle is nicely horrific, the small stage gradually filling up with dismembered and decapitated bodies - another thing puppetry does well.

There are music, dialogue in Sicilian and notes to supplement the visual strength of the narrative. After the ending, the tapestries are removed so that audiences may see, as it were, the works, and Mimmo Cuticchio recounts his family's history. It was worth listening to.

Schulte, RTÉ NSO/ Markson, NCH, Dublin

Michael Dungan

Stravinsky - Scherzo fantastique. Violin Concerto. Firebird.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was well rewarded for the courage of its planning convictions with an all but full house for an all-Stravinsky programme on Friday night.

The concert, first instalment in a season-long exploration of the Russian 20th-century master, presented the well-known Firebird ballet music alongside two rarer works.

The first of these was the very early Scherzo fantastique, Opus 3. It's a stylistically unsettled piece, composed at a time when Stravinsky's own distinctive voice had yet to settle into a fully harmonious relationship with the voices of those composers who were then a strong influence. Among these voices is that of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, whose orchestral colouring is evident as are echoes of The Flight of the Bumblebee. There is an unmistakable visit from Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice and, in the slower central section, the presence of Wagner.

Notably absent is the mature Stravinsky's quirky humour, a characteristic that colours the busy outer movements of the 1931 Violin Concerto. A telling contrast, the concerto pointed up the distance travelled by the composer from apprenticeship to a neo-classical work that uses a retrospective formal design and disguises a full orchestra as a chamber ensemble.

Soloist Rolf Schulte produced an extrovert sound well-suited to the boisterous self-confidence of the opening. That said, the highlight was the second of the two slow movements in which Schulte tapped into Stravinsky's homage to the solo violin music of Bach.

The complete ballet music from The Firebird, the first of Stravinsky's historic collaborations with Diaghilev and Les Ballets Russes, is like a single, hour-long crescendo, building consistently through various detour episodes until it culminates in a huge and thrilling conclusion. Conductor Gerhard Markson navigated this build-up with unfailing vision, drawing from his players the particular energy and colour which the music of Stravinsky demands.

Ulster Orchestra - Thierry Fischer

Waterfront Hall, Belfast

Dermot Gault

Strauss - Don Juan. Mozart - Piano Concerto No 21. Prokofiev - Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet.

The start of a new subscription series is a chance for an orchestra to play to its strengths, and Fischer's taut but flexible Don Juan proved a convincing demonstration of the rapport he has built up with the Ulster Orchestra. This was assured and incisive playing which could nevertheless relax meltingly when required. Fischer gave us 10 excerpts from the Prokofiev ballet which taken together made a convincing whole. The strings produced a burning, intense tone for "Romeo at Juliet's grave" and Fischer's flair for drama, his tense but measured rhythmic sense, made the death of Tybalt brutally stark.

The Mozart was an example of Fischer's approach to the classics, with the music always kept on the move, even in the slow movement, which went some way towards reconciling the music's dreamy proto-romanticism with a flowing Andante tempo.

Philippe Cassard's light-fingered but slightly skittish playing featured some cadenzas new to me, interesting if not in period.