Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review the Ensemble Avalonat the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the Palestrina Choirat St Ann's Church in Dublin and the Mursky, Vogler String Quartetat Dublin Castle.

Ensemble Avalon at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Beethoven - Trio in E flat Op 1 No 1. Brahms - Trio in C minor Op 101

The set of trios for piano, violin and cello to which Beethoven accorded the honour of being his Opus 1 is forever linked to his famous falling-out with Haydn. As his would-be teacher and mentor in Vienna, the older (and very well-disposed) composer had expressed doubts concerning the third of the three trios, observations which the young Beethoven mistook for jealousy.

As it happens, though Haydn was among the most important of early influences on Beethoven's style, the Op 1 set features little that is obviously Haydn and instead sounds like fully-formed Beethoven, much more so than, say, his early string quartets.

The Ensemble Avalon - playing the first of the set in E flat - seemed to take their lead from this strong finger-print, bringing out Beethoven's energy and humour, his impetuous spirit.

They underlined and clearly relished the harmonic surprises and twists least likely to appear in music by Haydn, so that the performance had a youthful self-confidence and adventurousness that came across as highly authentic.

The Brahms C minor Trio sounded authentic also, the outer movements coloured with a very Brahmsian storminess until the sky cleared with the switch from minor to major in the finale. The storms also gave rise to a bit of acoustic congestion, however, with the deeper sonorities from the piano and cello sometimes piling up and obscuring the violin. Unaffected by this was the slow movement, the Avalon drawing out all the grace and warmth and tenderness with which Brahms imbued it. Michael Dungan

Palestrina Choir, OSC/Wolff at St Ann's Church, Dublin

Bach - Cantatas 77, 164, 33

The Orchestra of St Cecilia began its survey of Bach's church cantatas back in 2001, and is spreading the more than 200 works over 10 annual concert series.

This year's series began on the day when church-goers at St Ann's, Dawson Street celebrated the parish's 300th anniversary - a reminder that this early 18th-century music is being heard in an early 18th-century venue.

The OSC and their regular cohort of vocal soloists are joined each week by a different guest choir, whose director usually conducts.

This week, however, the visitors were the Pro-Cathedral's Palestrina Choir, whose director Blánaid Murphy is on maternity leave.

The baton therefore passed to the pre-eminent musicologist Christoph Wolff, who made his first cantata appearance with the OSC last season.

Wolff, who is Adams University Professor at Harvard and director of the Leipzig Bach-Archiv, is the world's leading Bach scholar. His many publications include a biography of the composer that's now available in more than half a dozen languages, and a three-volume study of the church cantatas.

Speaking before the concert, Professor Wolff drew attention to the texts of the three cantatas, which are all proper to the 13th Sunday after Trinity, and explained how their references to Jesus's summary of the Law are symbolised in canon of the musical kind.

The performances were sturdy and avoided extreme tempos, and Wolff was sparing in his control of articulation and balance. This meant that the positive and brightly energetic contributions of the Palestrina choir were somewhat overshadowed by heavy instrumental playing, and that soloists Lynda Lee (soprano), Robin Tritschler (tenor) and Jeffrey Ledwidge (bass) had to labour against some loud accompaniments.

Nevertheless, the refined solo singing of Alison Browner (alto) was a ray of light. Andrew Johnstone

Mursky, Vogler String Quartet at St Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle

Haydn - Quartet in E flat Op 64 No 6.

Schnittke - Piano Quintet. Brahms - Piano Quintet

For their first appearance in Ireland, back at the TCD's Edmund Burke Theatre in 1988, the members of the Vogler String Quartet placed a quartet from Haydn's Op 64 and one from Beethoven's Rasumovsky set around a work from the 20th century, Bartók's Sixth.

The same formula was promised for the group's latest tour, with Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet of 1976 as the filling in the sandwich. But at Dublin Castle the Rasumovsky disappeared and was replaced by Brahms's Piano Quintet.

The change made for an evening of curious contrasts. Both quintets gave their composers considerable trouble. Schnittke struggled for four years on a piece in memory of his mother, and Brahms worried even more than usual over the scoring of his quintet. He completed versions for string quintet (which he destroyed), one for two pianos (which he preserved and allowed to be published), as well as the actual quintet for piano and string quartet.

The Voglers are insightful guides into music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They were fully at home with Schnittke's strange mixture of tortured anguish, expressed through closely intertwined clashing microtones, and seraphic calm, conveyed by writing of child-like innocence.

Eugene Mursky, saddled with a short grand piano with a less than sweet-sounding treble, was less at home with the style, and didn't always seem to see that less can mean more in unlocking the expressive content of this often highly-charged music.

He was like a different player in the Brahms. He accepted the sonic limitations of the piano in this most fierily powerful of quintets. And yet, while this was a performance in which the four strings were allowed more consistent prominence than usual, the balance of musical weight between pianist and quartet somehow always worked, and the group's viola player, Stefan Fehlandt, and cellist, Stephan Forck, were on particularly fine form.

The Voglers played the sixth of Haydn's Op 64 quartets (the work which actually opened their first Irish concert) with unforced clarity. Michael Dervan