Reviews

Classical music from the experimental to the romantic and an under-rated Irish singer/songwriter in today's reviews.

Dunne, Collins, IYWE/Cavanagh, Jeffrey

NCH, Dublin

Edward McGuire - Sirocco

Fergal O'Carroll - Amphion

Paul Creston - Marimba Concerto

Karel Husa - Music for Prague

Jennifer Walshe - small, small big

Philip Sparke - Year of the Dragon

Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue

Adam Gorb - Yiddish Dances

The spatialisation of sound tends to be seen these days as an area for electro-acoustic composers to explore. But the issue has been around for centuries. Think of St Mark's in Venice, Bach and Mozart using double or multiple orchestras, the offstage effects in Beethoven, Mahler or Respighi.

The design of most concert halls, however, does not readily take to experimentation in this regard. Until things change, works like Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras and Carré for four orchestras and four choirs, or Xenakis's Terretektorh, which disperses 88 players among the audience, are always going to be difficult to accommodate.

When Dublin composer Jennifer Walshe was commissioned by the Irish Youth Ensemble for a new work in 2001, she took the bit between her teeth. Her small small big spreads the players out into small groups and explores the possibilities of raw instrumental sonority, including, as is her wont, a range of sounds that are normally shunned.

The IYWE, which was founded 20 years ago as an initiative to mark European Music Year 1985, bravely re-scheduled the work in this year's retrospective programme.

With a different layout of the groups, the playing sounded less tentative than four years ago, and the spatialisation was altogether more effective in its blending and layering of sound.

The evening's other works of an experimental cast were bound up with non-musical concerns. Edward McGuire's Sirocco is a kind of bird's-eye travelogue taking the listener northwards from the Sahara to the composer's native Scotland. Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 is a heartfelt evocation of the plight of the Czech capital in its blackest of summers.

James Cavanagh, the ensemble's founder and leading light, conducted all these with spirit, as he did Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with soloist Finghin Collins delighting the audience by treating the piece as a romantic warhorse. And James Dunne was a nimble soloist in the pioneering - 1940 - but rather prattling Concertino for Marimba. This was one of the works conducted by guest Wayne Jeffrey, whose style was more driven and punchy than Cavanagh's.

Michael Dervan

Ulster Orchestra/Thierry Fischer

The Spires Centre, Belfast

Mendelssohn - Overture and Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night's Dream Beethoven - Symphony No 5

At last, an ophicleide. In modern performances of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music this instrument is always replaced by a tuba, but finally we heard the part played on the instrument Mendelssohn asked for, blending in with the other instruments in a way the more rotund tuba signally fails to do.

To keep it company, there were period trumpets and timpani, the latter, I'm told, dating from 1860. But if the Ulster Orchestra sounded more like a period ensemble than I can remember hearing it before, it was because of the string playing, more transparent and historically informed than ever.

It was good to hear so much of Mendelssohn's delightful Incidental Music. Mary Nelson, Victoria Simmonds and Methodist College Senior Girls Choir were all pleasing in You Spotted Snakes, but one would have liked the words to have been clearer, and throughout one would also have liked playing of more charm and feeling and fewer mannerisms, particularly in the Intermezzo and the Nocturne.

The Beethoven seemed less hectic than the performance Fischer gave as part of his integral cycle 18 months ago, though moments of raggedness, brutally exposed by the dry Spires Centre acoustics, were a surprise.

The period timpani were effective in the transition to the finale, but the braying period trumpets became annoying after a while.

The venue's uncomfortable heat and lack of air were also problematic.

Dermot Gault

Juliet Turner

Spirit Store, Dundalk

It's the first of three nights recording a live album and filming an accompanying DVD, and the jitters are showing: fluffed intros, retakes, polite requests for audience interaction, natural banter.

Throughout it all, Irish singer-songwriter Juliet Turner is poised and in control; she might give the impression she's a bag of nerves ready to crumble, but ultimately she's as steady as a rock.

Turner is - has always been, in this writer's opinion - one of the most intriguing of Irish female singer-songwriters, and totally unlike the usual fey, sensitive types that balance aspiration with little talent. She arrived several years ago with an acoustic guitar and a batch of brittle, poignant songs; her broad accent and even broader outlook, her bittersweet tastes, marked her out as one to watch.

She has been very successful, both here and in the UK, but her acerbic, spiky nature (which informs her best material) is in danger of being undermined by a perceived lack of credibility.

This is unfair, of course, but it does indicate a potentially damaging imbalance of perspective (and precisely how do you inhibit or limit that?), and her positioning between the likes of Gemma Hayes and Cathy Davey (young, edgy) and the likes of Eleanor McEvoy and The Corrs (mature, settled, comfy).

Certainly, Turner could fall either way, but some of the songs she sings, and the way she sings them (notably on new song A Girl with a Smile, and older material that includes Falling, 1987, Vampire - the latter one of the most underrated, and best songs in Turner's portfolio) indicates that she just might be ready to claw back some of the very fine values that made her such a compelling performer from the beginning.

There were more than glimpses of that on display on Thursday night; the live CD/DVD might be an industry staple of breathing space for an artiste to come up with even more goods, but Turner for one still seems to be formulating a cunning plan for a creative reinvention of some kind. Underestimate her at your cost.

Tony Clayton-Lea