Reviews

Irish Times' critics review Kiri Te Kanawa at the Helix and the Alba Sting Quartet at the Hugh Lane Gallery, both in Dublin

Te Kanawa/Reynolds

Mahony Hall,

The Helix, Dublin

All of Kiri Te Kanawa's most recent visits to Dublin have involved amplification in extremely large or outdoor venues. Her appearance at The Helix offered, by contrast, a song recital, pure and simple, taking in songs in German (Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Strauss), French (Duparc, Debussy, Hahn, Fauré), and Italian (Puccini).

It would be idle to pretend that, with her 60th birthday in view next year, Te Kanawa's lyric soprano voice has the sensuality and bloom that wowed audiences when she sang the role of the Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden in 1971. The tone has thinned, the agility and reach are not what they used to be, and some of the tempos seem more gauged to current limitations of breath than to concerns of music or interpretation.

Her presentation was simple, without any drama or acting out. She seemed happy to sing a whole song, hands clasped, swivelling ever so slowly to embrace all the listeners within her view.

She was at her best in those songs where an outpouring of tone in the upper register was asked for. This was freely given in the songs placed at the end of each half, particularly Strauss's Allerseelen and the closing Canto d'anime by Puccini.

Julian Reynolds, playing a piano that had tuning problems that brought public comment from Te Kanawa herself, was the soul of accompanimental discretion, scaling carefully to the size of the voice, and handling the pianistically awkward speeds with panache.

The low-key atmosphere of the evening brightened for Puccini's O mio babbino caro as an encore, and the audience's response suggested they would - and why not? - have traded much of the rest of the evening for more in the same vein of warmth.

Michael Dervan

Alba String Quartet

Hugh Lane Gallery,

Dublin

Quartet Op 64/5 - Haydn. Quartet No 2 - Janácek

The recently formed Alba String Quartet, whose members studied together in London, is, on the evidence of this concert, assured of a high place in the hierarchy of string ensembles. Haydn's Quartet, known as "The Lark" because of the high violin part in the first movement, was played with a ravishing simplicity. There was no sense that we were being given an interpretation of the music; the players had somehow cultivated an unobtrusive naturalness that gave an impression of air and light and the lark's song, played by Nicola Sweeney, sounded as effortless as the bird over the summer heath. The sobriquet was well chosen.

Janácek's Quartet No 2 is very different music. In it the composer has been able to translate into sound a passion that one feels would have burnt the paper it was written on if it had been put into words. (The work's subtitle is Intimate Letters.)

The notes on the stave do not live until they are heard and inflame the audience. The Alba Quartet played with an overwhelming ardour that prompted the thought that here was the Tristan and Isolde of the string quartet repertoire.

Janácek's characteristically short paragraphs, veering from the richly romantic to the simple folk idiom, from the disembodied utterances of the ascetic to rhythmically stimulating dances, are disconcerting, but the Alba Quartet made them all cohere in a very powerful performance.

Douglas Sealy