Reviews

Irish Times writers review two shows from the opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

RTÉ Living Music Festival

The Helix, Dublin

Music in Germany and Britain since 1945 was the declared focus of the weekend's RTÉ Living Music Festival at the Helix. It was a tall undertaking for a handful of concerts over a single weekend, especially since artistic director Kevin O'Connell allowed himself to stray into pre-war territory, had to find place for the premières of three RTÉ commissions from Irish composers and also threw in a couple of non-German, non-British pieces.

The weekend's featured composer was Hans Werner Henze, whose Seventh Symphony, commissioned for the centenary of the Berlin Philharmonic and premied in 1984, provided a fitting climax to the final concert.

Henze's is a richly allusive music - two seminars by Jens Brockmeier dealt densely and wordily with the composer's notion of "Musica Impura" - and in the musical ferment of the immediate post-war years he retained many of the very connections with the musical past that other leading figures of the time were endeavouring to jettison.

The Seventh Symphony, which includes a voiceless setting of Friedrich Hölderlin's Hälfte des Lebens, is a work of dark, eruptive, irresistible power. It calls for a large orchestra, which is used with what can momentarily seem like hyperactive abandon.

But even when the clamour is at its most extreme, Henze manages to assert a grandness of vision and purpose that makes the work unusually symphonic in the Beethovenian sense for a piece written in the closing decades of the 20th century.

Pascal Rophé's performance with the RTÉ NSO had sweep and grandeur, tenderness and delicacy, imperiousness and supplication, and the music spoke with a fullness, clarity and intimacy that once again confirmed the Helix's Mahony Hall as Dublin's finest acoustic for large-scale orchestral music.

The Irish début of Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern under Sian Edwards brought another extended, extraordinarily energised work, Jagden und Formen (Hunts and Forms), completed in 2001 by Wolfgang Rihm.

Rihm creates an experience that's rather like being buffeted by stormy winds to the point where speech would be impossible and even breathing could become an issue.

The work is a visceral frenzy, the writing as virtuosically demonstrative as that of a latter-day Liszt, and yet the music is in fact so carefully-paced that a sense of accumulation over 50 minutes can be sustained through passing moments of calm as well as through the writing of greatest wildness. It's that sense of accumulation which leaves the listener at the end both drained and exhilarated.

The other highlight of the festival was the short programme of electro-acoustic music presented by Frank Corcoran, not from the mixing desk as you might have expected, but from the stage of the theatre in the Helix, the spoken delivery being very much in the wry, opinionated, informative, associative manner that Corcoran has made his own.

The pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Étude), György Ligeti (Artikulation), Corcoran himself (Quasi una Missa), Roger Doyle (The Idea and its Shadow), and Georg Hajdu (Heptadecatonic Drops) were of interest not only in themselves, but also in the way they contextualised into a very specific view on some of the major issues surrounding electro-acoustic music.

Corcoran became the human performer of this concert, and, most unusually for such an event, the faders on the mixing desk, once set, were mostly untouched while the pieces - never over-amplified - played.

Corcoran's instrumental writing is usually of a rough cast, bold, blunt, even primitive in manner and effect. His new work for Ensemble Modern, Quasi una Visione (one of an ongoing series of Quasi pieces) seemed rather diffuse on a first hearing, rather like a spattered and smeared painting that looks, well, just spattered and smeared.

Fergus Johnston has found a wonderful image for his new Binn an tSíorsholais (The Peak of Eternal Light) to do with a lunar peak that finds itself, eclipses excepted, always bathed in sunlight. The spatial groupings of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Laurent Wagner did not on this occasion yield the sort of effects the composer seemed to be hinting at in his pre-concert talk.

Rachel Holstead's Roses for Icarus was premièred by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, and brought the group into areas of grating, grinding, 21st-century sound that is anything but a regular part of their repertoire. The work generates its tension by contrasting the sounds of strain with lighter writing of agitated character, in a way that almost suggests a translation from the world of electronic music into the domain of acoustic instrumental reality.

Performances that stood out in the weekend were Henze's Orpheus Behind the Wire from the National Chamber Choir under Celso Antunes, Harrison Birtwistle's The Cry of Anubis from the RTÉCO with tuba soloist Owen Slade, and Matthias Pintscher's en sourdine, an often inwardly gesturing violin concerto with Viviane Hagner and the RTÉ NSO. The major work in the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's programme, Henze's Kammermusik. was seriously undermined by the failure to provide texts (Hölderlin, again) that even a native German speaker would require to make sense of the piece.

Michael Dervan

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Natasha Bedingfield

Vicar Street, Dublin

Natasha Bedingfield is fast becoming an expert at diffusing clichés. When she runs low on well-worn metaphors and truisms, however, she simply writes songs about writing songs. So far she has released a single called Single, and recently made a blank piece of paper her muse. But her first number one, These Words, is a more head-spinning, self-reflexive success.

"Threw some chords together," it begins, "the combination D-E-F," and those chords punch their way beside her. It soon settles into what should be the naffest chorus in history: "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you."

How the hell does this 22-year-old London pop sensation get away with it? The answer flounces onto the stage of Vicar Street in a red dress with more exuberance than a pound full of puppies. For someone who offers critiques in place of choruses, Bedingfield is exquisitely unselfconscious. Strutting through I'm a Bomb, a slice of turbo R&B in the mode of Quincy Jones, she then launches a woe-betide version of All By Myself.

It's a joke of course, juddering into her "declaration of independence", Single, but it begins an easy rapport with her audience, which, like her music, hovers between the unaffected and cringe-worthy. Commending us for our collective beauty, Bedingfield is equally liable to close her eyes, stretch out her hands and say, "Now, just feel the music guys". Sadly, it's so difficult to feel Silent Movie or I Bruise Easily that Bedingfield must cheerlead her way through the filler ballads, urging our hands in the air while belting her way through various vowel sounds.

Still, pop is a business for lucky shots, not sharp shooters, and Bedingfield only has to hit once. Making These Words sound almost rapturous, she drops all pretence, amps up the cliché, and, for a moment, love sounds like a new invention.

Peter Crawley