Reviews

Michael Dervan is at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival inBantry, Dermot Gault saw The Mikado in Belfast, while Tony Clayton-Lea heard Tony Bennett in Vicar Street.

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry, Co Cork

By Michael Dervan

String quartets have always been at the heart of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, and this programme looked at the history of the quartet medium from either end. The Petersen Quartet opened the day with one of the earliest quartets, a five-movement Divertimento in G by Haydn, his Op. 1 No. 4, composed around 1760.

Although the music often defaults to three real parts (leaving two of the instruments to double-up), it also reveals that felicity of invention which so distinguishes Haydn, even in his lesser-known works. In the Petersen Quartet's performance it was the delectable echo effects of the central Adagio and the dangerously brisk, almost breathless, final Presto which made the strongest impression.

The Petersens also offered the teenage Schubert's Quartet in E flat, D87, but the day's other quartets were the other end of the repertoire, from Peteris Vasks's Quartet No. 2 (Summer Tunes), of 1984, and Kevin Volans's White Man Sleeps, originally written in 1982 for two harpsichords (in African tuning), viola da gamba and percussion, and premièred in its now familiar quartet guise by the Kronos Quartet in 1986.

White Man Sleeps is one of a number of works in which Volans worked African musical material into classical contexts. He's even spoken of wanting "to achieve an Africanisation of western music". The quartet, which treats the Africanisation in an extremely loose way, transforms patterns of rigorous rhythmic intricacy into textures that shimmer and shift, and offer a delight, like the effervescence of champagne on the tongue. The piece insists on living in the moment, and the Smith Quartet's performance seemed as fresh as when the piece was new.

Vasks, the Latvian composer who was commissioned by the West Cork Festival two years ago, has fresh ideas in his Second Quartet but seems to milk them for rather too long. Even the resourceful Silesian Quartet didn't manage to make the piece seem to fully justify its length.

The main evening concert included another work of the 1980s, Alfred Schnittke's Piano Trio, a 1992 re-working of the 1985 String Trio commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Alban Berg. This is Schnittke in no-holds-barred mode, a composer who delights in extremes, rocketing his listeners and punching above and below the belt with the subtlety of a modern fairground ride. The performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Alexander Ivashkin (cello) and Irina Schnittke (piano) lacked nothing in commitment, but the fervent emotionalism of the violin playing seemed to tilt the music into a degree of self-parody that was seriously counter-productive.

The day also included a programme that added Arnold Bax's meandering Fantasy Sonata for harp and viola to trios for flute, viola and harp by Takemitsu and Debussy. The performances by Mathieu Dufour (flute), Garth Knox (viola) and Godelieve Schrama (harp) left one with the feeling - not dispelled even by the Debussy - that music with harp should be dispensed only in very measured doses. The Osiris Trio also offered Fauré's late, elusive Piano Trio. Their clean-lined performance left the music sounding as elusive as ever.

The Mikado

Grand Opera House, Belfast

By Dermot Gault

Youth Opera Northern Ireland was originally scheduled to perform Grace Williams's one-act opera The Parlour. But Williams herself noted that although The Parlour had received good reviews, "audiences just didn't come to it". For whatever reason, it was replaced by The Mikado, a work at the opposite end of the familiarity scale.

But if The Mikado is well-worn for audiences, it is probably new to these performers. The performance had its faults; conductor Tim Rhys-Evans, who, with pianist Jeffrey Howard, provided an element of professional stiffening, doubled as prompter at one point, and some of Gilbert's wittier lines went missing. But if opportunities for laughs were missed, they weren't milked either. The production had an air of last-minute contrivance, but the performance had an engaging freshness which seasoned performers of the Savoyard tradition might have envied.

These very young voices will develop with time, and I wonder how well some of them carried to listeners further back or higher up than my seat in the stalls. Karl McGuckin (Pish-Tush) and Barry McAleer (Pooh-Bah) grew in confidence as the performance progressed. There was charming singing from Judith McQuillan (Yum-Yum), Leanne Macaulay (Pitti-Sing), Gemma Prince (Katisha) and from the women's chorus, which outnumbered the men's by about three-to-one. Jonathan Henderson (Mikado) was lumbered with a load of business but dispensed, thankfully, with the supposedly traditional silly laugh. Matthew Ioan-Sims (Nanki-Poo) gave the strongest performance vocally. Francis Fee (a suitably effete Ko-Ko) sang the Tit Willow song feelingly. It was a good night out, but it would still be interesting to hear these performers in a real opera.

Tony Bennett

Vicar St, Dublin

By Tony Clayton-Lea

There is a movie of Tony Bennett's life in the pipeline. This is not surprising, for at almost 80 years of age Bennett has seen some action: the second World War, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Hugh Hefner, underworld rumblings, parties, cocaine, tax problems and a latter period of unprecedented success and credibility. There's no doubting that his continued appeal lies in the timelessness of his material and his ability to work an audience.

Of course, Bennett's considerable achievements don't look like work at all.

It's a measure of his talents that his shows came across as effortless and seamless exercises in mellow showmanship. If sweat were broken, we couldn't see it, and the only things that snapped were fingers.

Backed by a superb jazz outfit that kept musical fussiness to a minimum (but who flipped out when required), Bennett tended to segue from one song to another, keeping his patter low-key but sincere. Songs simply flowed: Who Can I Turn To, I Left My Heart In San Francisco, All Of Me, I Got Rhythm, Fly Me To The Moon, The Best Is Yet To Come, If I Ruled The World, Let's Face The Music And Dance.

His nightclub background dictated that Bennett sang the songs as if he had only just discovered them - the mark of a true professional. Yet even he surpassed expectations with a spine tingling version of Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo. If the rest of Bennett's material suffered from anything, it was a nagging sense of over-familiarity, but with Mood Indigo the recognition factor faded into the background by virtue of its overriding sense of regret, remorse and melancholy.

A rare night, then, of a performer in his twilight years maintaining, if not adding to, his reputation. The voice is just about intact, and the sentiments of love - being in love, having your heart broken by love, the need for love - are expressed elegantly and eloquently. Bennett's iconographic status of The Last Great Torch Singer remains.