Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events taking place around Dublin.

Trpceski, RTÉ NSO/Markson

NCH, Dublin

MICHAEL DERVAN

Markevitch – Rebus. Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto No 1. Stravinsky – The Firebird.

Gerhard Markson was not the first conductor to espouse the cause of Igor Markevitch in Ireland. Colman Pearce got in before him, with a performance of Galopback in 1987. But Markson has been assiduous in promoting the work of Diaghilev's last composing discovery, a teenage shooting star who ended his career as a composer at the age of 30 and, after the second World War, reinvented himself as a conductor of international renown.

Markson was one of his conducting students, and clearly has a great grá for the fashionably mechanistic, stiff-jointedly polyrhythmic, imaginatively coloured and often primitivistic world of his teacher's orchestral compositions. Think of the thrusting Honegger of Pacific 231, the iconoclastic side of the young Hindemith, the shock tactics of George Antheil, or the rawness of Milhaud's L'homme et son desir, and you'll have an idea of the milieu that Markevitch evokes.

Markson has been behind three RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra performances of the music for the ballet Rebus, written by the 19-year-old Markevitch in 1931. This concert, one of two conducted by Markson himself, was the richest of the three, showing a palpable delight in the composer’s chugging rhythmic chains and fondness for accumulative crescendos à la Rossini.

The music shows a combination of chunky crudeness and sophisticated orchestral manipulation which Markson made hard to resist. Nor was there any resisting the approach of Simon Trpceski in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. This is a work that’s been come at from many angles of virtuosity and sensitivity. Trpceski gave the refreshing impression of being able to see it with simple clarity and deliver it with a tight rhythmic control. He eschewed much of the rutted rubato to which the piece is often subjected, and the outcome was a performance of exceptional freshness.

He avoided all temptations towards grandiloquence, took an excitingly unflinching line through the gruelling octave passages, and, with judicious accompaniment from Markson, never gave the impression of having to struggle to be heard. The audience’s palpable delight resulted in two encores.

The concert ended with the backward-looking sumptuousness of Stravinsky's first major ballet, The Firebird, a fairy-tale score of exotic, kaleidoscopic delights. Markson offered it in its lavish original scoring, and emphasised the music's frequent longing as much as its bursts of extravagant colour.

Darragh O’Neill (guitar)

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

MARTIN ADAMS

Darragh O'Neill's lunchtime programme featured a neat balance of contrasts and similarities. He included two of his own compositions, The Jugglerand Manggha, short character pieces which are descriptive, openly charming, and so based on traditional guitar techniques that they seem to spring from inside the instrument.

Charming is a term that could be used to describe the whole concert, including a polished, welcoming invitation to turn off mobile phones, O’Neill’s informal comments between some of the pieces, and his ability to hold the audience’s attention without being obviously demonstrative. But it takes more than mere charm to make such a diverse programme work.

One of O’Neill’s most engaging qualities is the combination of his subtle musicianship and his knack for intimate music-making. There were a number of slips, both of memory and of technique, but that was not what one remembered. He does not strive too much, and several pieces featured some of the quietest playing I can recall from the many guitar recitals I have heard in the John Field Room.

His stylistic awareness matched the wide range of periods and compositional styles. The 19th-century Spanish works were high-class salon music. The several transcriptions from Bach suites were played with awareness of their courtly dance background. The folk-influenced baroque style of Bach’s older Spanish contemporary, Gaspar Sanz, was captured with a flamenco-like flair.

The organisation of the programme was inventive. Three movements from Bach's Cello Suite No 1 BWV1007 were arranged in an order that left the strongest meat till last, while the final four works – Scarlatti's Sonata K32, Sanz's Espanoletta, Carolan's Carolan's Receiptand Sanz's Cararios– made an effective, almost sonata-like grouping, organised by key and mood to end the concert in lively style.

Ruiten, Grosser, Proud

City Hall, Dublin

MICHAEL DUNGAN

The Sunday at Noon series continued its March-April sojourn in City Hall with a programme of Baroque music showcasing Dutch soprano Lenneke Ruiten in songs by Henry Purcell.

Her small representative sampling naturally favoured texts about longing, love and sadness in songs full of references to pastoral characters from classical Greek poetry and of thinly veiled sexual undertones. After a jolly opening with “Nymphs and shepherds come away”, she went straight to the heart of the matter with “If music be the food of love”. She did the third of Purcell’s three versions, a great song, almost a mini-cantata with recitative- and aria-styled passages in a fantasia that is ever-changing in response to the words.

Here and elsewhere, notably on the words "soft" and "sweet" in "Ye gentle spirits of the air" from The Fairy Queen, Ruiten's long, meandering melismas on a single vowel sound seemed to cross over from a vocal to an instrumental sound.

The naturalness of her singing belies an excellent technique, which is seemingly effortless and without ostentation. Not a single moment was about her; it was always about the text.

The highlight was “O solitude”, sung over one of Purcell’s favourite devices, the repeating bass-line or “ground”.

Ruiten’s delicate strength unleashed the composer’s “peculiar Genius to express the Energy of English Words” (as described by publisher John Playford), and made you marvel once again at how art can derive so much beauty from grief.

Ruiten was expertly partnered on harpsichord by Malcolm Proud and on the seven-string bass viol by Sarah Grosser. Both shone in instrumental interludes by Louis Couperin and Christopher Simpson respectively.

Although an amount of detail was lost to the blooming resonance of City Hall, the overall sound quality was pure and immediate in a nicely conceived and beautifully presented concert.