REVIEWS

The Gutter Twins at The Academy, the National Symphony Orchestra at NCH and Ensemble Avalon at the Hugh Lane Gallery

The Gutter Twins

The Academy, Dublin

A few years ago, Greg Dulli came to town with his band The Twilight Singers, and loudly trumpeted the fact that Mark Lanegan would be appearing with them. For a certain generation of music fan, Dulli and Lanegan were heroes – they had achieved critical acclaim in the 1990s with their respective bands, The Afghan Whigs and Screaming Trees, delivering some of the most searing, perfectly realised albums of the decade. But that Twilight Singers show in the Village was excruciatingly bad – Dulli appeared uninterested, and Lanegan barely appeared at all, shuffling on stage to do backing vocals on just a few songs. After the creative highs of their original acts, this was a serious disappointment.

This show saw them return in the guise of their collaborative act, The Gutter Twins, part of a series of seated, acoustic performances with guitarist Dave Rosser dubbed the Stripped Down in the Gutter tour.

This time, at least, Lanegan was on stage for most of the show, but despite sitting centre stage, he managed to appear so detached he gave the impression of being elsewhere.

Dulli, on the other hand, looks more and more like one of the Blues Brothers with every passing year.

For a spell, it was a promising evening. The mellow delivery quickly found a reflective rhythm; the eloquent, focused rage of the Whigs and the Trees was gone, as if rueful melancholy has filled the void left by youthful anger. But the momentum dissipated, and at one point, as eager audience members began to call out beloved song names, Lanegan growled to Dulli: “Let’s get this done.” It was a revealing moment, perfectly displaying his seemingly dismissive approach to the show, as if performing for paying fans was an onerous task. While Lanegan’s voice is a fine, gravelly instrument, it’s wasted on such a deliberately anti-charismatic performer.

Later, Dulli berated audience members for talking between songs and taking a photograph. Such an adversarial approach to your audience might work during a full-throttle rock gig, but during a sedate acoustic concert, it just seems cranky, and summed up what turned out to be a charmless and half-hearted performance.

DAVIN O’DWYER

Giltburg, RTÉ NSO/Lintu

NCH, Dublin

Einojuhani Rautavaara– Before the Icons.

Shostakovich– Piano Concerto No 2.

Sibelius– Symphony No 2.

Some concerts tell you that something special is underway from the very first note. Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu’s debut with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was one of those.

There was an almost startling immediacy, fullness and power to the orchestral sound, a confidence, and even a swagger to the playing, which were to lift most of the evening well out of the realms of this orchestra’s norms.

It was one of those days when the orchestra sounded transformed.

The musicians played out of their skins, as if Lintu were one of those conductors whose vision is so clear and command so secure that his every wish becomes irresistible.

Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his Before the Icons in 2005. It’s an extended reworking of a piano piece he wrote half a century earlier, at the age of 27. Its contrasts are extreme, from gravity to levity, from full-on attack to Messiaen-ish, mystical fervour. Here its manner was always effective, even when its content was less than persuasive.

Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto was written in 1957 for his 19-year-old son Maxim, who chose to play it at his entrance exam for the Moscow Conservatory. The piece is all high jinks and sweetness, or rather, a combination of effects that range from the manic to the schmaltzy.

Moscow-born, Tel Aviv-trained Boris Giltburg played it with exuberant, cartoonish exaggeration, as a kind of dazzling, mid-20th-century musical hokum. The audience liked it so much that he offered an encore, Rachmaninov’s famous Prelude in C sharp minor, which he prodded and poked with the same technically resourceful but rather shallow-seeming curiosity.

Shallowness was off the menu in the second half, when Lintu delivered a searingly direct account of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, the kind of performance that made this well-known work sound at once utterly familiar and utterly fresh. In spite of the often blazing sonorities, the effect was stirringly darker and cooler than usual (cheap emotionalism was studiously avoided), leaning more into the future (it was completed in 1902) than on the past, as it is often made to sound.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Ensemble Avalon

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Ronan Guilfoyle– A Little Blues.

Mendelssohn– Piano Trio No 1 in D minor.

Composer Ronan Guilfoyle has fused his twin loves of jazz and classical music in numerous pieces over the years.

A Little Blues– here receiving its Dublin premiere with the Ensemble Avalon, its dedicatees – is the latest example. It's a 10-minute, single-movement work for piano, violin and cello, grounded in classic 12-bar blues structure but with its bluesy colours deliberately veiled.

With the 12-bar structure in the background, what’s to the fore is something playful and occasionally irreverent, with a toe-tapping pulse against which the instrumental rhythms pull in overtly jazzy fashion.

Much less jazzy than the rhythms are the melodic lines, which contain few if any bent or bluesy notes.

The Ensemble Avalon – whose previous visits to the Hugh Lane Gallery have successfully included other jazz-inflected works, such as Bernstein's Piano Trio and Café Musicby Paul Schoenfield – produced a lively and persuasive response without actually letting their hair down. Then again, the score didn't ask them to.

In fact, more hair was let down in Mendelssohn’s romantic D minor Piano Trio, although always with the Avalon’s finely judged sense of restraint. It’s a model of easy-to-follow classical form – two contrasting, cello-led themes conversing in the opening movement, peace and warmth in the slow second, a spirited Scherzo and a return to seriousness for the finale – combined with a good helping of heart-on-sleeve emotion.

Typically, the Avalon's less-is-more approach delivered the strength of that emotion without recourse to overstatement. Their communicative interplay was as effective where depth was required as it was in the impish Scherzo, with its echoes of Mendelssohn's much-loved instrumental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

MICHAEL DUNGAN