Reviews

Kilkenny Arts Festival: Michael Dervan reviews a number events at this week's Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Sorokow, Adachi/ Kilkenny Arts Festival:

Sonata in E minor K304 - Mozart, Sonata No 2 - Prokofiev, Sérénade mélancolique, Valse-scherzo Op 34, Mélodie Op 34 - Tchaikovsky, Carmen Fantasy - Waxman, Figaro - Castelnuovo-Tedesco

The closing concert of the festival was by the violin and piano duo of Anton Sorokow and Momoko Adachi. Moscow-born Sorokow, whose father Leonid is violinist of the Vienna Mozart Trio, is currently leader of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra. Adachi teaches at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

This programme consisted of two of the best sonatas in the repertoire (by Mozart and Prokofiev), sentimental pieces by Tchaikovsky, and showpieces familiar (by Waxman) and unfamiliar (by Castelnuovo-Tedesco). Throughout it showed Sorokow in a more favourable light as both musician and technician than his partner at the piano.

That's not to say his playing was by any means unblemished. His intonation was not always reliable. His technical fireworks stuttered a bit at times, and he was apt to fade in volume in rapid passages when the going got extremely heavy. But he produced a consistently attractive tone, and approached the bravura passages with a swagger that helped carry him through any incidental hitches along the way.

Adachi, by contrast, was often simply unimaginative and dull, weak in anticipating what her partner was likely to do, and not always suitably supportive when that was her allotted role.

The two players rarely worked together satisfactorily as a duo. They tended to engage in the musical equivalent of talking over each other, Sorokow obtruding in the Mozart, Adachi often getting in the way and failing to find the necessary flow in the Prokofiev.

This was, in short, a frustrating evening.

Michael Dervan

Trans-Fusion/Kilkenny Arts Festival

The first classical music initiative of the Kilkenny Arts Festival's new artistic director Claudia Woolgar is a programming strand called Trans-Fusion. It was designed to give "a residency opportunity for professional development to six young international musicians", and the man in charge was trumpeter John Wallace, who's also principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

The residency resulted in four concerts over three days, and the budding star of the two that I heard was mezzo soprano Carolyn Dobbin, who has recently given up a career as a teacher of art and design to concentrate on musical performance.

She's been heard in recital around Northern Ireland, and has taken small roles in opera productions at Castleward. Here, she showed herself at her best in a lunchtime group of cabaret songs, the beauty of her voice sounding unaffected and natural, the comic touch light, and the musical presentation free and easy to match.

Falla's Canciones populares españolas were also done with a light touch, and a presentation that was at all times pleasing. But there was little depth of character here and the singing ended up sounding merely nice. The piano accompaniments of Georgian pianist Marina Nadiradze were admirably clean but expressively pallid, as was her handling of solo pieces by Debussy and Ravel.

The evening concert also included what was billed as the première of the Sonata for two trumpets by the English composer Robin Holloway, who celebrates his 60th birthday later this year - a movement from it was performed at the International Trumpet Guild conference in 2001. This work, played by John Wallace and German trumpeter Andi König, sets out to avoid the obvious in trumpet writing, handing a calm, unstressed line forwards and backwards between widely-separated players, reserving the expected brassy and fanfarish writing for their union onstage at the end.

Both König, an uneven player, and Wallace were heard to best advantage in the Holloway. Wallace had clearly bitten off more than he could chew in the arrangements of Gottschalk, and the Piazzolla tango arrangements were also slightly uneasy.

There were strong contributions by Faroese trombonist Andras Olsen. He played two theatrical Swedish pieces - Folk Rabe's Basta and Fredrik Högberg's Su Ba Do Be - that can be traced to the influence of Christian Lindberg (though Rabe is himself also a trombonist) and ultimately Luciano Berio's Sequenza V, which featured in one of the earlier Trans-Fusion programmes.

Michael Dervan

The Memory of All That/Bewley's Café Theatre: A friend of George Gershwin, who was fond of playing his own music on the piano, once commented that an evening with Gershwin was a Gershwin evening.

He was hardly complaining, and those who turned up last week to hear Fiona McElroy deliver another such session were clearly happy with the gig.

The singer opened with a couple of swingers, Fascinating Rhythm and Lady Be Good, that allowed her and her musical group to flex their muscles.

As it transpired, however, she is not really from the jazz camp, offering a determined verve rather than a nimble-voiced interpretation of the faster numbers. Her performance covered a wide range of the composer's songs, and the slower ballads fared best.

The Porgy and Bess numbers - Summertime, It Ain't Necessarily So and I Got Plenty of Nuttin - were an impressive tribute to what is now established as a great American opera. Mysteriously omitted was the heart-breaking I Loves You Porgy, a song to stop any show. But there were many other hits from the shows, and one happy feature of the programme was the inclusion of the introductory verses, not often heard. Ira Gershwin was a nonpareil lyricist, and his words blend with the music in the most ingenious and beguiling way.

A surprise guest was actor Tony Flynn, who joined the hostess in a couple of duets, and added two solo numbers of his own. His voice is not that of a professional singer, but he can carry and interpret a song, and his presence added zest to the evening. Stir in Dave Irwin on the piano, a terrific drummer and a colourful bass guitarist, and the charm was wound up.

Gerry Colgan

Matt Molloy, West Ocean String Quartet, Anúna/ NCH, Dublin: The Beo Celtic Music Festival's bold programming continued here with collaboration between Neil Martin and the West Ocean String Quartet and Matt Molloy, master of the flute and Chieftains veteran.

The northern-based West Ocean String Quartet, anchored by Belfast cellist Martin, and Sligo fiddler Seamus McGuire have been merging borders between classical and traditional for a few years now, and as Martin's compositions gain in volume and confidence, so do the threads interweave more seamlessly between the genres. However, this is no po-faced attempt to better the lot of either traditional or classical styles; Martin's impish delight in dropping classical references into the midst of quintessentially traditional phrases creates exactly the kind of air pocket that breathes life and energy into the music.

Martin's mischievous tale-telling between pieces plays no small part in illuminating the musical nuances. Ceol Mheáin Oíche Na Seanbliana, a piece written to herald in the new year, sat cosily alongside a beautifully pitched reading of Turlough O'Carolan's Mrs Crofton. But it was in the final collaboration with Molloy on a set composed especially for the flute genius, (The Guiding Wind) that they finally left terra firma and soared atop a celebratory magic carpet, where flute and strings coupled in delightfully illicit incarnations. Finely honed music cossetted by superbly talented musicians.

Michael McGlynn's 17-piece Anúna has reached its 16th birthday and mercifully, it is beginning to display signs of petulance and disregard, a welcome respite from the unremitting seriousness of the past. This was a set that helped reinvent the 17-strong choir, although their longstanding sartorial insistence on playing fashion victims of The French Lieutenant's Woman-era continues to jar.

With no less than three new male voices among a total of nine male and eight female performers, Anúna continue to preserve a monopoly on practitioners of medieval chant and plainsong. With a repertoireenlivened by McGlynn's witty introductions, even the pastoral The Flower Of Magherally took on an air of blissfully unrealised lust amid the taller tales of love lost, found and unrequited. Sinara, a 1900 ode to what could have been, was positively a baby boomer alongside the 14th century Miserere.

As a reminder of just how boisterous and creative old Irish music could be (in the absence of musical instruments aside from the voice), McGlynn's introduction of Dulamán, an old mouth music piece that sparkled and shimmied its way all the way down the backbone, was faultless. Noel Eccles's percussion lent a muscular edge to the arrangement that fitted seamlessly with the group's newfound nonchalance.

Knowing asides between the twin McGlynns jarred, betraying the one and only incident where professionalism was usurped by nepotism. Still, reassuring evidence that even a medieval chant can be invigorated by references to the present as well as the past.

Siobhán Long

Ulster Orchestra, Thierry Fischer/ Ulster Hall, Belfast:

Night on a Bare Mountain - Mussorgsky, arr. Rimsky-Korsakov, Cello Concerto (original version) - Prokofiev, May Night Overture - Rimsky-Korsakov, Symphony No 1 in E flat - Stravinsky

Original versions have a charm of their own. The combination of novelty and familiarity can add a piquancy to one's appreciation that is quite separate from one's enjoyment of the music per se.

In the case of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto, heard here in its original version of 1938, much of the music is very enjoyable in itself: broadly singing "Russian" themes for the cello, underpinned by characteristically deep orchestral sonorities, alternating with brilliant, ironic passages bristling with difficult passage-work for the soloist, the capable Li-Wei. The trouble is that it just doesn't hang together, the final set of variations seeming to go on forever. In the 1940s Prokofiev recast the piece as the Sinfonia Concertante for cello and orchestra, in which form it is better known, and on balance the revised version is an improvement. But one is grateful that this series of free BBC Invitation Concerts has unearthed this and other rarities.

Another rarity is Stravinsky's early Symphony, completed in 1907. It's lively, clever, assured, and reminiscent of just about every 19th-century Russian composer without presaging Stravinsky's later music (although the tremolando strings at the end of the third movement could, with hindsight, be thought to foreshadow The Firebird). Thierry Fischer relished its romantic breadth and youthful energy, but could have restrained the brass more, even if the responsibility for this imbalance is primarily the composer's (in the unflattering words of Glazunov, "rather heavy instrumentation for such empty music"). There was more substance in Rimsky's May Night Overture.

Dermot Gault