Reviews

Irish Times reviewers cast their ears over the latest concert performances.

Brodsky String Quartet NCH, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Javier Alvarez - Metro Chabacano. Gershwin - Lullaby. Barber - Quartet Op 11. Mario Lavista - Reflejos de la Noche. Ravel - Quartet in F

The Brodsky Quartet are regular visitors to Ireland. But their itineraries, which have included multiple appearances in Derry (home town of viola player Paul Cassidy), festivals in Kilkenny and Killaloe, and concerts in Belfast and Galway, have rarely taken them to Dublin.

Their appearance at the National Concert Hall on Saturday presented them in a most unusual programme, which featured just a single work from the standard repertoire, Ravel's Quartet in F.

There were two other famous names listed. But Samuel Barber's sole quartet of 1936 is now more celebrated for what has been extracted from it - the ubiquitous Adagio - than as a work in its own right. And Gershwin's Lullaby, his only work for string quartet, written around 1919, is more likely to be planned as a sweet encore piece than included in the heart of any quartet's main programme.

The other works were by contemporary Mexican composers. Metro Chabacano by Javier Alvarez (born 1956), was originally written in 1986, and reworked for a 1991 installation in the subway station after which it is now named. Reflejos de la Noche (1984) is the second string quartet by Mario Lavista (born 1943), and recreates in string sonorities some of the characteristic sounds of the Mexican night.

The Brodskys favour a delivery with a beautiful finish, to the point where the group runs the risk of sounding self-admiring. The players certainly went to town on the Gershwin in a way that rather smothered it, although this did increase the effect of the tip-toe ending. And the repetitive nature of the two Mexican pieces, once set up, didn't leave anywhere to go.

The ability to dwell in the moment paid rich dividends in the Barber, especially in the Adagio, which can easily sound undernourished in its original context. On this occasion it was persuasively sustained, without cloying and without exaggeration.

Ravel's Quartet in F may never have achieved the currency of Barber's Adagio, but the quartet as a whole - and this is the popular verdict, too -fully eclipses the effect of the Barber as a whole. The Brodskys played it with svelte panache, and the pizzicato-rich second movement brought a burst of spontaneous applause from an enthusiastic audience.

KT Tunstall The Sugar Club, Dublin

Peter Crawley

It's official. In a world of unmatched hype and broken promises, KT Tunstall can do no wrong.

When the Scottish singer-songwriter appeared on Jools Holland last year - transforming a decade-long career into an "overnight success" story - the airwaves barely seemed big enough to contain her. Performing alone, she conjured up a rhythm section, backing vocals and winningly squawky trumpet noises; seamlessly looped through her guitar pedal.

But before the stealthily layered, bluesy texture of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree can be repeated in The Sugar Club (a venue that Tunstall, bound for the Olympia in May, could now sell out several times over) it comes with an apology. "Apparently it's all over your radio like a rash," she winces.

If her album, Eye To The Telescope, had failed to deliver on such promise, you could understand the excuse. But this cheery self-deprecation only adds to the pleasure of a contained explosion - a major talent, up close and personal. An otherwise uninhibited performer, Tunstall sashays and stomps to the sinewy rhythms of Another Place to Fall, unleashing her voice from a soft purr to a self-possessed growl through Miniature Disasters, Other Side of the World and False Alarm.

"Here's a love song," she calls before the soulful Universe & U. "But it's got a big fat beat!" In Tunstall's grasp, delicacy and muscle don't cancel each other out. Somehow an acoustic guitar and a head full of relationships can sound like an undiscovered combination. Her lyrics can be vulnerable, but her chords arrive with a don't-mess-with-me punch, and her sensational band can let rip without burying her melodies.

In the feverish percussion of Suddenly I See, where a tambourine is perfectly partnered with a dustbin lid, Tunstall's songs absorb everything she can throw at them. They ring out with the experience that the human heart moves not only to a big fat beat. Sometimes it pounds and clatters, too.

David Owen Norris Elmwood Hall, Belfast

Dermot Gault

JC Bach - Sonata in E Op 5 No 5. Haydn - Sonata in B minor Hob XVI - 32. JC Bach - Sonata in C minor Op 7 No 2. Haydn - Sonata in D Hob XVI - 51

"The Birth of the Sonata" is the title of a new short series of free BBC Spring Concerts. The first concert of the series included sonatas by Bach's youngest son Johann Christian, the 'London Bach', which were apparently intended originally for the square piano, an instrument which Johann Christian was involved in marketing and of which David Owen Norris has made something of a speciality.

This concert was, however, given on a modern piano, and while the instrument certainly gave plenty of scope for romantic expression in the forward-looking slow movements, it seemed cumbersome in the virtuoso outer movements. At the end of the concert a now properly warmed-up pianist gave us an encore in the form of a second take of the first movement of the effervescent E major. There was a gain in both brilliance and assurance, but perhaps the work itself is best suited a lighter period piano.

The Haydn sonatas, the earlier B minor sonata especially, are made of sterner stuff, more angular in style and, one couldn't help feeling, more thematically memorable. The quirky, slowish central minuet of the B minor, Haydn at his most enigmatic, thrives on the fine shades of tone and meaning possible on a modern instrument, and Norris played it tastefully and wittily, but in the short D major sonata, one of Haydn's later works, the effect once again was heavy.