Reviews

A look at what is going on in the world of the arts.

Tomasz Stanko Quartet

Vicar Street, Dublin

Anyone fortunate enough to have heard the Tomasz Stanko Quartet at the Bray Jazz Festival last May, and who went to hear the group in Vicar Street on Sunday, would have gone there anticipating something special. They weren't disappointed; the quartet - Tomasz Stanko (trumpet), Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass) and Michal Miskiewicz (drums) - surpassed, if anything, the quality of their performance here last year.

The second in the Improvised Music Company's year-long celebration of the music of the great German label, ECM, the concert offered further evidence that this Polish quartet is now one of the finest jazz groups anywhere in the world. And it continues to astonish because of the sense of freshness and discovery it brings to the material, all of which was composed by the leader. This is all the more remarkable because virtually all of the repertoire performed was drawn from their memorable ECM CD, Suspended Night, recorded almost two years ago - the same repertoire which formed the basis of their concert in Bray last year. Despite this, there was nothing to suggest, even remotely, that the group was coasting or on automatic pilot. They were simply magnificent.

Apart from the gifted individuals, especially Stanko and Wasilewski, who make up the quartet, they share an extraordinarily acute awareness of what each other is doing. Their mutual responsiveness and the delicacy of their internal balance are remarkable and sustained. This must be due in large part to Stanko himself, who seems to have an instinctive emotional grasp of the shape of each performance. His interventions are crucial in determining their dramatic contours and in nudging the quartet's superb sense of dynamics in the most satisfying ways. In this sense he is like a sculptor who works in sound, hewing from the raw blocks of material the shapes that occur to him with the assistance of his brilliant colleagues.

Much of the musical raw material, in fact, has relatively little harmonic movement - Stanko, who attaches no importance to naming them, has called them "blueprints" and expects them to be expanded, pulled apart and re-assembled as the group feels them in performance, and, if need be, to be altered far beyond their original forms. This approach allows the quartet to espouse creative freedoms more readily than might otherwise be the case. It also puts a premium on creativity and the quality of the group's individual and collective improvisations. Few have ventured there so often and so fruitfully as this one.

In keeping with his musical philosophy, Stanko came on stage and, making no announcement beyond naming the musicians at the end of each set, began playing. The music's the thing. His - and the quartet's - reward was a deserved standing ovation. For those who want names, they performed Little Thing, Song For Sarah, Euforila, Sweet Thing, Gonja, Hetmento's Mood, Troiki, Die Weisheit, Kaetano and the concluding Elegant Piece. An un-named encore was the only unfamiliar composition performed. A marvellous concert, which already seems likely to be one of the best jazz events we'll hear this year.

Ray Comiskey

An International Festival of Chamber Music

Queen's University Belfast

Instead of spreading a programme of concerts throughout the year, the Belfast Music Society has concentrated its activities for this season in a weekend International Festival of Chamber Music. Now in its 40th year, the Nash Ensemble has performed the Schubert Octet often enough, but one hasn't always heard its players enjoying the bucolic rhythms of the scherzo to this extent, or relishing the work's full sonorities with such obvious pleasure. The friendly acoustics of the Harty Room at Queen's University helped.

The Nash Ensemble sometimes plays arrangements of orchestral works, and while, for example, the arrangements made by Schönberg and his pupils for his private performing society have a documentary interest, one usually comes away feeling that the composer knew best when he scored the original for full orchestra. The version of Till Eulenspiegel for violin, double bass, flute, clarinet and horn worked, however, because the very idea has a certain Eulenspiegel-like effrontery, and various small recompositions encourage the belief that the otherwise unknown arranger, one "Hasselohrl", is a pseudonym for Strauss himself.

On the following evening the start of Matthias Goerne's recital was delayed, and then Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte was interrupted when the singer objected because a door at the back of the hall had been left open. Quite right, too. Goerne's involvement in the music he sings is total, and there can be no breach in the charmed circle into which he draws his listeners.

His exceptionally beautiful baritone commands a wide compass and an astonishing range of tone and expression, which brought insights into every song in Schubert's Schwanengesang. Goerne's ordering of this posthumous collection added the beautiful Herbst, discovered later, and omitted Die Taubenpost - which, however, made an apposite encore. Alexander Schmalcz was an ideal partner and the University's Great Hall a suitably intimate and resonant venue.

It's an equally friendly venue for strings, as was shown in the concert by The Lindsays which ended the festival. This group is not shy of emotional commitment either, although in grappling with the music's essence, the niceties of tone production can be sacrificed perhaps too readily, as in the last movement of Janácek's Kreutzer Sonata quartet or the Grosse Fuge finale of Beethoven's Op 130. But the gypsy finale of Haydn's Op 76 No 5 Quartet had plenty of spirit and there was depth of expression, and beauty of tone, in the slow movement of the Haydn and the Cavatina of the Beethoven. Sadly, this was probably our last chance to hear this veteran ensemble which is retiring, as a quartet, in July this year.

Dermot Gault

Guinness Choir, UO/Milne

Church of the Holy Child, Whitehall, Dublin

Verdi - Requiem

As a musical event, Sunday night's performance of Verdi's Requiem looked simultaneously to the past and in new directions. The Guinness Choir's choice of the large Church of the Holy Child on the airport road was a throwback to an earlier time when the big Dublin choirs regularly performed in churches around the city. What was new was the orchestral partner: the Ulster Orchestra.

These two aspects of the venture were very successful. The church - an obvious preference for sacred music - was jam-packed, more than 1,100 bodies helping to temper what I was told had been a "swimming" acoustic when the pews were empty during rehearsal. And the playing of the orchestra, under conductor David Milne's clear-sighted and purposeful direction, was of a very high order.

This was crucial in the all-important opening moments when atmosphere is won or lost. Milne brought down the cellos' quietly grieving melody to the edge of audibility. The effect was to rivet listeners and establish a mood of devotional reflection that was sustained right through, even underscoring the loudest moments.

The choir was strong enough to overcome their considerable distance from the audience, and enough to produce an audible near-whisper on "requiem". Their lively and utterly committed responses to Milne and to all the opera-influenced effects and contrasts in Verdi's score were what ultimately made this performance so successful.

The contribution of the four soloists was more mixed. Soprano Julie Melinek, whose tremulous delivery often masked exact melodic line, nevertheless produced breath-taking high notes that were the making of several dramatic moments. Contralto Deirdre Cooling-Nolan, in the part for mezzo-soprano, was not up to her usual high standard, often singing under the note and so disrupting the tuning in ensemble sections.

Tenor Martyn Hill, notably in "Ingemisco tanquam reus" ("Guilty now I pour my moaning"), and bass-baritone Nicholas Folwell, for whose range the acoustic presented the most challenges, were at once expressively individual and at one with Milne's bigger picture.

Michael Dungan