Reviews

Irish Times reviewers review La Dona Manca o Barbi-Superstar at the Cork Opera House, Roma, RTÉ NSO/Bellincampi at the NCH in Dublin, Bord Gáis Opera Gala at the National Concert Hall, and  American Music Club at The Village, Dublin.

La Dona Manca o Barbi-Superstar

Cork Opera House

Mary Leland

Presented as part of Cork's year as European Capital of Culture 2005, La Dona Manca o Barbi-Superstar draws its emotion from the luscious, technically variegated voice of Dacil Lopez.

That barbie-dolls - mimicked on stage - define modern womanhood or at least maim or distort the feminine image is, in this case, the chosen theme of Barcelona choreographer and director Sol Pico. Her choreographed treatise on aspects of the female condition includes three musicians whose work is supplemented by taped orchestral and folk or flamenco-style arrangements.

This music seems like a platform for the dancers. Although they manipulate, dance on and around and even through properties such as a wire-sided movable staircase, the stage floor itself does not seem capable of containing the almost dangerous energy they accumulate as they work through a series of suites and variations.

In the dance vocabulary of Sol Pico the whole body is required to perform, and the fluent physicality of this group - as well as their shared athleticism - is an indication of their mutual devotion to work which is both exploratory and challenging. And yet not moving, if the apparent pun can be forgiven.

The company members work beautifully with one another, realigning for fade-outs or seeping back into an ensemble, but there is little engagement with the audience. It is as if we at a distance.

Perhaps this is inevitable with polemic, although it must be said that the production is often very funny with a kind of sly knowingness illuminating even those sequences designed to run on into intimate savagery.

Using the body as a symbol for experience, the dancers (wearing flesh-coloured body-stockings to reduce the wobble factor) patrol the stage as much as dance on it; dance itself is reinvented when Sol Pico arrives, wearing scarlet blocked shoes as if hobbled by a convention.

This is dance by declamation - vivid, sometimes violent, always with a strong sense of line and of rhythm, and, at little more than 60 minutes, short.

Roma, RTÉ NSO/Bellincampi

NCH, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Stravinsky - Symphony in Three Movements

Liszt - Piano Concerto No 2

Berlioz - Symphonie fantastique

Berlioz was never a man to shirk an extravagant challenge. His Symphonie fantastique, premièred in 1830, just three years after Beethoven's death, takes a kind of Beethovenian idealism and attempts to reshape it through an imagination blessed with a romanticism so extreme it's hard to imagine that any known music could ever fully contain it.

The symphony, intended to depict "an episode in the life of an artist", is blatantly autobiographical, sparked by Berlioz's having seen Irish actress Harriet Smithson playing Shakespeare in Paris in 1827.

He wanted the thematic basis of the symphony, its idée fixe, to be able to represent "the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious raptures, his jealous fury, his persistent tenderness, and his religious consolations". The symphony includes a ball, a scene in the country and some opium-inspired nightmares.

Berlioz's achievement is to have written a work that is both fully of its time and yet can seem completely outside of it. His handling of the orchestra and his breaking of rules and barriers sound as fresh today as when the work was new.

And the music certainly sounded fresh, impassioned and imaginatively unpredictable under the inspired direction of guest conductor Giordano Bellincampi with the RTÉ NSO at the NCH last Friday.

Bellincampi's approach was like that of a master chef, taking ingredients already well-known for their strong flavours, and making those flavours both combine and stand out with unexpected intensity.

He beguiled the ear with tenderness. He adjusted balances between instrumental lines and choirs as if he were opening doors on vistas of new sonorities.

He whispered at the threshold of audibility. He kept his powder dry so that he could surprise with a blast of full power. And, throughout, he kept his pulse on the emotional landscape of the composer's tribulations.

The players of the RTÉ NSO met him all the way with atmospheric fidelity and passion.

The first half of the programme was not on quite the same level. Italian pianist Igor Roma, sixth prizewinner at the 1994 Dublin International Piano Competition, showed in Liszt's Second Piano Concerto the same qualities as he did in the competition - commonplace musicality allied to a sterling technical delivery. He was heard to much better advantage in a two-piano recital with Enrico Pace at the NCH last year.

Bellincampi's urgent approach to Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements of 1945 didn't create the same sense of illumination as his Berlioz. But it did serve at a number of points to highlight in the Stravinsky of the 1940s some striking echoes of the young man who had shocked the world with The Rite of Spring three decades earlier.

Bord Gáis Opera Gala

National Concert Hall

John Allen

If concerts of operatic bits and pieces can be something of a lottery, then Saturday's Bord Gáis gala at the NCH offered more than its fair share of jackpot prizes.

We had two singers, both in good form and performing repertoire that was, for the most part, suited to their talents.

And they were abetted by a conductor, Laurent Wagner, who supported them with adroit shaping and pacing as well as a firm control of the orchestral dynamics.

He was equally assured directing the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in overtures, preludes and entr'actes by Rossini, Puccini, Donizetti and Bizet.

We have heard Cara O'Sullivan and Tito Beltrán before in this series. The Cork soprano sang with all her usual self-assurance. She misfired on a couple of climactic notes, but that happens to every singer at some time.

Otherwise, she dazzled with telling accounts of soprano showpieces from Faust, Gianni Schicchi, I puritani, HMS Pinafore and The Merry Widow. Her poised legato and Wagner's delicate way with Lehár's evocative instrumental colouring in the latter item were altogether delightful.

The Chilen-born lyric tenor was every bit as impressive as on former occasions. Singing, as the Alan Jay Lerner lyric has it, "in a voice three times his size", he gave elegant performances of Faust's "Salut demeure" and Edgardo's tomb scene from Lucia di Lammermoor.

His lower register was somewhat shallow, but he had no problems above the stave, where he exploited his thrilling top notes in a selection of popular tenor show-stoppers.

The meatiest items in the programme were the afore-mentioned Lucia death scene and a couple of extended duets; the sublime "fountain" episode from the same Donizetti opera and the closing passages from Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

American Music Club

The Village, Dublin

Anna Carey

For a man who says about three songs into his band's set that they "don't rock", Mark Eitzel and American Music Club act like a band who rock only too well.

AMC are one of American music's many unsung heroes, although the enthusiastic crowd at the Village gig was definitely willing to give them their due. They've been playing their deceptively epic folk-tinged rock for over two decades, but on the evidence of the Village gig they're now rocking harder than ever.

Eitzel is an intensely charismatic frontman who could probably hold a crowd's attention if he was playing nursery rhymes. Luckily the powerful, jaggedly sweet music lives up to his personality.

Although the band "imploded" (Eitzel's words) 10 years ago and only got back together last year, their onstage chemistry is evident and the gig's atmosphere was electric.

American Music Club seem as comfortable with each other as if they had never taken a slightly acrimonious 10-year break. Eitzel and guitarist Vudi bantered in a snarky but good humoured way, and youthful new member Jason Borger seemed to have been warmly welcomed into the fold.

The band also seemed to return the audience's affection - at one memorable moment Vudi handed over his guitar to an audience member who played it wildly for the rest ofthe song.

And when Johnny Mathis's Feet prompted a mass singalong, bassist Dan Pearson turned his microphone and its stand towards the crowd.

By the time the band left the Village stage for the last time after their triumphant three-song encore, it was impossible not to be glad that their 10-year exile was over.