Reviews

Ali Bracken reviews Cut Chemist at The Village, Dublin and Michael Dervan reviews the West Cork Chamber at Bantry House, Co Cork

West Cork Chamber - Music Festival - Bantry House, Co Cork

Belfast composer Stephen Gardner has a way with titles. He conceived a recent orchestral work to be "an interpretation of an imaginary painting" (of the Rev Ian Paisley by Francis Bacon), and called it NEVER...NEVER...NEVER. And he's now written a new string quartet for the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet with the title Don't push your granny when she's shavin'.

The music is suppressed at the start, hardly moving, like held-in breathing, then builds up through quite conventional means to a sustained grey merry-go-round of crude ostinatos, before relaxing into a calm conclusion.

Gardner always comes across as a composer who has the courage of his convictions, and likes to leave in his work a certain rawness, of both craft and passion. In the new quartet's first performance on Sunday, the Vanbrughs moved with ease from the barely audible to the heavily insistent, but the piece never really ignited, and seemed to draw itself out to undue length.

The day's second work by a living composer was Verinnerung by the Swiss Michel Roth (born 1976). It is a piano trio and takes its inspiration from Mondrian's painting, Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue.

Verinnerung is a piece of extremes. It takes the listener down to the microscopic level, to witness the thinnest strands of tone, where a simple pizzicato is like an explosive intrusion. It explores the shimmer and shudder of sometimes churning microtonal clashes. And it layers violence and calm in unusual ways. The Mondrian Ensemble, for whom the composer has written a number of works, played the strangely compelling piece with a sense of absolute conviction.

Sunday's music-making in Bantry had begun over three centuries earlier, with a programme of Purcell, Johnson, Visée, Frescobaldi and Handel by the graceful and agile counter tenor Robin Blaze (he does a great line in musical stories, too) and the sensitive lutenist Elizabeth Kenny. Perhaps it was the lingering effect of the light-toned early music at midday, but some of the day's piano-playing seemed on the heavy side. In Brahms's Piano Quintet with the Callino Quartet, Julius Drake hammered like a man on a mission to make an all-too consistently explosive point.

It wasn't actually that he played loudly all the time, simply that the sense of his going at it flat out kicked in too often for the music's good.

There was a lack of variety, too, in Trio Wanderer's performance of Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat, and a want of lyricism and flexibility in a work where the composer's own propensity to overstate his case is already a challenge.

The Callinos on their own offered a deft, lightweight account of Webern's aphoristic and expressionist Five Pieces, Op 5, and the Mondrian Ensemble played the surviving movement of Mahler's early and immature Piano Quartet in A minor with the extraordinary up-to-the-minute preamble that Alfred Schnittke provided for the surviving fragments of the Scherzo.

But the performance of the day was the extraordinary account of George Enescu's Impressions d'enfance for violin and piano by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Mihaela Ursuleasa. This was so sharply characterised and so highly individual, especially in its treatment of the gypsy evocations, as to guarantee controversy. Enescu's musical pictorialism offers a strange mixture of innocence and experience which this performance captured to perfection. - Michael Dervan

Cut Chemist - The Village, Dublin

"I'm the consolation prize to U2," joked Cut Chemist as he finished up his set. "Well," he considered, "I'm a pretty cool consolation prize." The crowd roared approval, many hissing and booing at the mention of U2. Because, let's face it, it has been U2 overkill for the past fortnight. Some of us have been left indifferent to the mass hysteria surrounding their Croke Park concerts and have been patiently waiting for U2 mania to end. Many people feeling this way flocked to see one of the hardest working turntablists around and blow off some much-needed steam.

As expected, Cut Chemist, the turntablist behind Jurassic 5, wasn't content with playing a run-of-the-mill DJ set. With his cut-and-paste style and a seemingly endless supply of hip-hop and funk records, he kept it fresh.

Cut is from a school of DJs who don't just spin records, they regard their turntables as instruments and use them as innovatively as possible, creating new sounds. Not just anyone can do this of course, but Cut certainly can.

In his trademark T-shirt, he cut a relaxed figure on-stage. He chose dance-floor music with some hip-hop classics mixed in. Rappers Delight went down particularly well, and his frequent bouts of scratching met with the crowd's approval. About 90 per cent of the audience was male, which created a curious atmosphere but ensured easy access to the toilets. Homegrown support from Tu-Ki and Scope was energised and provided just the right introduction.

It was all over a bit too early - Cut left the stage just after 11pm - so we were just in time to meet all the U2 concert-goers dribbling back into town. - Ali Bracken