Reviews

Irish Timesjournalists review a selection of events around Dublin this week.

Flirtation: A Homage to John McCormack and Fritz Kreisler

NCH, Dublin

MICHAEL DERVAN

Something unusual can happen when the name of Fritz Kreisler is heard from the stage. There’s often a collective sigh from the audience, an anticipation of the sweet and sentimental pleasure that’s just around the corner.

Kreisler, who was born in Vienna in 1875 and died in New York in 1962, was one of the greatest violinists of his time, a man whose use of vibrato was to change the art of violin-playing.

He also wrote a large collection of musical bon-bons for violin and piano, some of them original salon pieces of exquisite finish, others arrangements of works by composers famous and obscure. He wrote other music too: operettas, songs and a string quartet. And he created quite a stir in 1935 when he revealed that some of the “arrangements” were not based on original manuscripts but were actually all his own work. Such an admission from so famous a player left some critics apoplectic. It was an interesting year, 1935, for it was also the one in which the Metropolitan Opera in New York banned the paid claque, and specifically forbade singers to hire claqueurs.

Some of Kreisler’s most famous recordings were made with great Irish tenor John McCormack. They worked together in studio for the first time for the Victor label in New York in 1914 (with Vincent O’Brien, the first director of the Pro-Cathedral’s Palestrina Choir) and made their last recordings together for HMV at Hayes in Middlesex 10 years later.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra and its principal conductor, David Brophy, took the unusual step of mounting a homage concert to Kreisler and McCormack at the National Concert Hall this week, with violinist Elizabeth Cooney and tenor Anthony Kearns.

It was an unusual step, because Kreisler and McCormack’s work together was mostly with piano rather than orchestra, and their two orchestral collaborations did not feature in this programme.

Although David Brophy told the audience of the special quality of McCormack's recording of Il mio tesoro, from Mozart's Don Giovanni – a veritable musical miracle of breath control – the programme opted for the opera's overture rather than the aria.

Brophy’s conducting was rather polarised, rough under pressure (and apt to cover his tenor in the songs and arias), then altogether more refined when calmer. Musically, the evening was Cooney’s. She didn’t seem inclined to imitate the swoons and scoops of Kreisler’s own style, instead playing the music straight, with agreeable shaping.

Kearns is a tenor with an easy manner, real vocal appeal and ready high notes. On this occasion, however, his phrasing was far from consistent and there was a lack of musical character, as if he felt that the nice sounds should alone be enough to carry a number. He was at his best in the evening's single French-language aria, Salut! Demeure chaste et pure, from Gounod's Faust.

Dublin Dance Festival: Miniatures

Project Cube

MICHAEL SEAVER

During pauses, dancers often take a sneaky glug of water. In Miniatures, José Navas takes a sip of wine. In the programme notes, Navas explains how solos are exposing, but such is his informality in the cosy setting of Project's Cube that the audience feel like confidantes in his front room. In early drafts of the work the audience were to do the wine-drinking, sitting in a circle with Navas dancing in the middle, but even in a more formal setting none of the intimacy is lost. Through short solo dances he offers glimpses of his life and loves and, in between, he sits quietly at the back of the stage, changes costume, takes a sip and a deep breath and continues.

He is an engaging performer who wins the audience over not just through his incredible, understated technique, but also through the honest charm with which he lays out his life. At one point he walks to the front of the stage and talks about how his father, like most Venezuelan fathers, had to teach him how to whistle. Then he whistles the first tune he learned – María Grever's Alma Mia– which his father whistled at every occasion, joyous or sad. Elsewhere he lip-synchs to Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall performance of Do it Again, but it is in his movement that Navas is most endearing.

His liquid, rippling movement is mesmerising, punctuated by slight gestures, so that on the word “mirada” he might draw his hand close to his eye or, on a sung phrase, seem to pull a word from his mouth.

The joyous finale to the music of Vivaldi is a summation not just of his life experiences but of his dance. Clear, eloquent, intimate, the danced miniatures mirror perfectly the painted miniatures, where more details are revealed the closer you look. Dublin Dance Festival runs until Saturday; www.dublindancefestival.ie

Grosvenor, UO/ Montgomery

NCH, Dublin

MICHAEL DERVAN

The young hopefuls have been and gone. The piano marathon that is the Dublin International Piano Competition has played itself out and declared its winner. An older international brigade is on the way. Before the month is out there will have been concerts featuring Boris Berezovsky, Nikolai Demidenko and Elisabeth Leonskaja, to show a different way of doing things. And from a different angle, here was English pianist Benjamin Grosvenor with the Ulster Orchestra.

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Grosvenor. He’s still in his teens, and made his biggest media splash by winning the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at the age of 11 in 2004. He’s still in full-time education, and restricts himself to a limited schedule of concerts.

He responded to a 2005 article about him in the Timesin London with a letter to the editor, stating: "The article about me seemed to suggest that I was under terrible pressure. I actually enjoy practising the piano and I love to perform in concerts. I never practise for more than two hours without a break and there are plenty of boys at my school who spend as long playing computer games as I spend practising."

In this concert, his performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto would actually place him closer to the older brigade than to the flashy youngsters of the competition. It wasn’t a matter of technique (though a high-jinks encore showed he can dazzle with the best), but rather that his response to the music seemed so natural, so free, so unencumbered. The forced brightness of tone favoured by so many young lions of the keyboard was entirely absent. He brought real freshness to the Grieg, from the impetuous opening to the soulfulness of the slow movement to the sparky finale. Conductor Kenneth Montgomery partnered him sensitively, though he didn’t always manage to anticipate all of the pianist’s exuberant surges.

The programme was most unusually structured, placing the concerto after, rather than before, the interval. In the first half, Montgomery delivered Rachmaninov’s last completed work, the Symphonic Dances of 1940, with often chunky brashness. He took a much more refined approach to Ravel’s Bolero, and his steady-as-she-goes approach resulted in a performance that persuasively accumulated explosive power.