Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events

Crash Ensemble/Pierson

Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD

David Lang– Pierced. Memory Pieces. Louis Andriessen– Workers Union. Garden of Eros. David Lang– Cheating, Lying, Stealing. Louis Andriessen– Trepidus. David Lang– Forced March.

Louis Andriessen, the best-known living composer from the Netherlands, was the subject of the début concert by the Crash Ensemble back in 1997. Crash celebrated his 70th birthday at the venue of that début appearance this weekend (a day before the actual birthday), and paired Andriessen’s work with pieces by David Lang (born 1957), a composer from the other side of the Atlantic (New York resident, but Los Angeles born), for whom Andriessen proved to be a seminal influence.

For Lang, Andriessen’s achievement was that he simply ignored the dichotomy between minimalism and modernism, a dichotomy, Lang says, which was felt far more keenly in the US than in Europe. Andriessen undermined the dichotomy by simply taking what he wanted from either side of the divide.

Lang, one of the trio of composers behind one of New York’s big new music franchises, Bang on A Can, shares with Andriessen a fondness for punchy impact (brake drums feature in the percussion line-up for a number of pieces), but this programme enterprisingly showed softer sides in the outputs of both men.

This seemed entirely apt in excerpts from Lang’s Memory Pieces (memory here used in the sense of memorial) for solo piano. Andriessen’s Garden of Eros is a string quartet with a light, floating quality that goes against the grain of the genre by pitting first violin against the other three instruments.

Such internal conflicts were also a feature of Lang’s Pierced, a kind of concerto for a trio of cello, percussion and piano (set against single strings in Crash’s performance rather than string orchestra) where soloists and ensemble inhabit independent worlds. Lang’s Forced March explores the interaction of an irregular melody against explosively drum-machine-like percussion.

The tour-de-force performance, however, was Andriessen's Workers Union of 1975, a piece without fixed scoring that's intended "for any loud sounding group of instruments". One of Crash's trademarks is the group's fondness for amplification (here it was applied with timbre-distorting effect to Memory Pieces and Garden of Eros), and in Workers Union it helped the ensemble to the rock music-like consistency of high volume that its audiences seem to like so much. MICHAEL DERVAN

Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of The Worlds

O2, Dublin

Roll up! Roll up! Flame and pyro effects! Amazing CGI animation! Cutting-edge hologram! Giant Martian fighting machine firing heat rays at audience! Like some arcane circus extravaganza, the 2009 stage version of Jeff Wayne’s epic space-opera promises dazzling delights for our delectation but is it all smoke and mirrors, or will our brains be suitably fried by this two-hour blast of symphonic sci-fi?

Jeff Wayne’s original 1978 album was sneered at by the prog set, who preferred “real” concept albums such as Dark Side of the Moon. It was the cruise ship on the topographic ocean of prog, a concoction of classical, pop and AOR that was cheesier than the moon. But, 30 years later, there seems no stopping the march of the Martians, as the stage show moves inexorably round the UK and Ireland this month, blowing away all in its path.

This isn’t a theatrical show featuring music – it’s a full-on musical show featuring a few theatrical flourishes, mostly entailing an actor or two running around the stage trying to avoid deadly heat rays. The main action takes place on a 100-foot wide screen, where a filmed cast flees the chaos and destruction wrought by the Martian invaders. The computer-generated scenes of giant cylinders blasting off from Mars and landing on Horsell Common, or the gunship Thunder Child under attack from the death-dealing tripods may look a bit like a computerised collage, but they sure beat Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s dreadful movie version of the HG Wells novel.

A giant holographic head of the narrator, Richard Burton, floats stage left, taking up max headroom and looking suitably eerie and disembodied. It’s an upgrade from a previous version, which by all accounts was a bit cut-and-paste.

The veteran band (featuring bassist Herbie Flowers and guitarist Chris Spedding, both of whom played on the original album) and the massive string section is conducted by Jeff Wayne himself, looking delighted that a few people still like his ol’ album. He never repeated the success of War of the Worlds on record, so he’s making the most of the continued popularity of his magnum opus, and milking the merchandising for all its worth.

Decending from above, the giant Martian fighting machine is not quite as scary as Burton’s head, but at least it’s scaled better than Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge.

Hearing the album’s big hit Forever Autumn being sung by the original singer Justin Hayward was probably worth the price of admission alone for many fans; it’s hard to take seriously a character in a greatcoat and pageboy hairstyle called The Sung Thoughts of the Journalist, but Hayward carries it off with gravitas.

Parson Nathaniel is played not by a hologram of Phil Lynnott (he sung on the original album) but by Aussie superstar Shannon Noll. In the 2007 tour, Irish singer Tara Blaise played the parson’s wife; former Hollyoaks actress Jennifer Ellison does the honours here.

The work itself comes to life on stage, its sonic flashes, leitmotifs and climactic build-ups driving it along to a satisfying finale. I wouldn't go back to the album, but I'd definitely take another spin on this space cruise. KEVIN COURTNEY

Concorde

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Alejandro Castaños– Angulos. Judith Ring– Whispering the Turmoil Down. Lundquist– Duell. Stephen Gardner– klezmeria. Judith Ring– Within an Egg of Space.

In this free afternoon concert, contemporary music ensemble Concorde presented first performances of new works it commissioned from Irish composers Stephen Gardner and Judith Ring.

Ring’s Within an Egg of Space is for flute, clarinet, piano, accordion, violin and cello. There is also a part for tape, pre-recorded by Ring in collaboration with Concorde.

It was often difficult to distinguish live from recorded sound. Rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that this didn’t matter, that such aural distinctions were as irrelevant here as detecting which horn plays the third of the chord in a Tchaikovsky symphony. What mattered was the cake and not the ingredients. Ring’s cake offers an inviting sound-world of curious instrumental colours, including what may be bird calls and small animal sounds, subtly backdropped by judicious stroking and striking of the piano strings from inside the lid. And it’s not merely a sound-world, but a work with structure, featuring two main high points which finally fade to nothing except a strong sense of completeness.

Concorde also reprised Ring’s 2007 Whispering the Turmoil Down in which, by contrast, the roles of the solo bass clarinet and its pre-recorded self are deliberately clear-cut. The live instrument plays a thoughtful, meandering song to a taped accompaniment of exquisite chimes and temple gongs somehow, magically, extracted from the bass clarinet’s hardy character.

The soloist was Paul Roe who also featured alongside violinist Elaine Clark in the other premiere, the duo klezmeria by Stephen Gardner. As intended, there was more suggestion of Jewish klezmer music in the instrumentation than in the actual notes, and in its rushing, rather mad personality it seemed to fulfil the composer’s own need for “something lighter and more direct” after completing “a big broody orchestral work”.

There was a second duo in Duell by Sweden’s Torbjorn Lundquist featuring, I thought, collaborative rather than adversarial dualling by percussionist Roberto Oliveira and virtuoso accordionist Dermot Dunne.

The concert opened with Ángulos for full ensemble by Mexico's Alejandro Castaños. Unusually, it featured a cadenza-like passage for piccolo, nicely taken by Madeleine Staunton, which then turned into something pretty rare in this repertoire, an old-school fugato. MICHAEL DUNGAN