Reviews

Reviewed today are Foster-Williams at the Gould National Gallery in  Dublin and the Kenny Wheeler Big Band performance at Vicar Street.

Foster-Williams: Gould National Gallery, Dublin: Schubert: Winterreise (with screening of film by Mariele Neudecker) Have you ever watched television or a film on video with the sound off? Things change in more ways than you might expect.

The facial and gestural exaggerations of actors stand out all the more clearly. The falseness of fights and other faked interactions increases without the presence of sound effects. The addition of extra elements to musical works might be expected to create the opposite sort of problem.

There have been intriguing efforts to add depth to performances of Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise. The tenor David Pisaro toured it to out-of-the-way places in England, walking from venue to venue and avoiding the luxury of hotel accommodation. He wouldn’t have had to try very hard to give the impression of being footsore, and it’s a fair bet that his non-musical travails served to sharpen the responses of his audiences.

Artist Mariele Neudecker didn’t put herself quite so directly in the position of Schubert and poet Wilhelm Müller’s love-lorn protagonist. Instead she shot a series of videos on the 60th parallel north, from Shetland to St Petersburg, for projection as a background to either a live performance (as produced by Leeds-based Opera North at the National Gallery in Dublin on Sunday), or one recorded for a gallery installation (at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios until February 12th).

Her evocative images of winter bleakness in town and country, on land and over water, gained from the lack of an associative soundtrack.

The silent movement of a ship through ice-crammed water is somehow
more resonant than the noisy reality. Indeed, much of her imagery – melting
icicles, frozen lakes, dusty snow swirling on a deserted road, fence-trapped rubbish flapping in the wind, the movement of air trapped under ice – is the sort of thing film directors have used at key moments, often soundlessly, to direct audiences toward deeper feelings.

The singing of Andrew Foster-Williams, a bass baritone with an impressive, rich-toned presence, seemed altogether more concerned to underline the specifics of his anguish, sometimes stressing himself momentarily out of vocal control. Pianist Christopher Gould somehow managed to achieve more in the way of expressive yield though showing less in the way of musical effort. And, the question will inevitably be asked, did the video add significantly to the experience of the song-cycle? No. But the song-cycle certainly benefited the viewing of the video. - Michael Dervan

Kenny Wheeler Big Band: Vicar Street:

The year-long celebration of the music of the great German label, ECM, was launched on Sunday by one of the finest big bands  any of us is ever likely to hear in this country. Sponsored by Mitchell & Associates architects, organised by The Improvised Music Company and assisted by the British Council, the visit of the orchestra was led by composer, orchestrator, flugelhorn player and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. The band was packed with the cream of British jazz talent – and it didn’t disappoint.

A sextet with Wheeler, Ray Warleigh (alto/flute), emerging wunderkind Gwilym Simcock (piano),  John Parricelli (guitar), Chris Laurence (bass) and Martin France (drums), provided two opening performances.

The reeds included the veteran free player, Evan Parker, Duncan
Lamont, Stan Sulzmann, Julian Arguelles and, in at short notice, Julian Siegel. A virtuoso-packed trombone section included Gordon Campbell, Barnaby Dickson, Richard Henry and Mark Nightingale, while the trumpets included such established notables as Henry Lowther, Ian Hamer, Derek Watkins and John Barclay.

The sextet’s opening Kind Folk, although it was marked by excellent solos, saw them more or less feeling their way into the performance. A very free sextet intro for Sly Eyes resolved into an absorbing tango, with lyrical contributions from flugelhorn and flute, at which point singer Norma Winstone came on stage with the full orchestra. What followed was memorable.

By some creative alchemy, Wheeler’s compositions (and orchestrations) are often instantly identifiable as his. They have a very savoury melodic grace, a gentleness tinged with melancholy, sometimes with ominous undertones, but always with an underlying strength and, where necessary, enough grit to contrast with the beauty.

The band's opener, Gentle Piece, with lyrics by Winstone, was a perfect
illustration of Wheeler's gifts.

A rubato opening with piano and Sulzmann on soprano, resolved into a beautiful vocal, supported by a gorgeous trombone section, and then by the full band. Thereafter the writing, with sections riffing in canon, provided ideal backing for solos by alto, trombone and trumpet, before the ensemble reprise brought back Winstone, this time using a wordless vocal.

The sheer variety  of Wheeler's devices were again evident on the faster Double, Double You, which, after a very free beginning with Wheeler and
Parker, contained some beautifully judged writing for the band and allowed space for seven soloists, including Hamer, Lamont, Wheeler and France.

The second set was superb. Wheeler's lengthy suite, 2005, was remarkable not only for the quality of his writing again, and the superior solo work, but also for his ability to reconcile surprise with inevitability. It's an astonishing work, but an encore showed what he could do with material not his own. This was a 20-minute fantasia on How Deep Is The Ocean which included passages of such invention as to amount to new
compositions. A night to remember. - Ray Comiskey