Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events

Take That

Croke Park, Dublin

By the time Take That asked 80,000 people in Croke Park if they were ready to run away with the circus, the band had already emerged from a giant mass of rainbow balloons, danced on ladders surrounded by bird-shaped kites, and travelled through the stadium on the back of a giant, translucent mechanical elephant. Any sceptics in the crowd should have been well and truly won over already.

As a teenage indie music snob, I developed an unwilling, Stockholm Syndrome-esque affection for Take That thanks to my younger sister's insistence on playing their Live at Wembleyvideo on a daily basis. And the band's charm, dancing skills and genuinely fun pop songs seemed even more appealing when they were subsequently replaced in the charts by the turgid likes of Westlife. So it's hard not to be delighted that their recent comeback has been so successful. This is because they're not just trading on nostalgia – many of their recent hits have been good, solid pop songs and, impressively, they were greeted by the crowd with just as much enthusiasm as the old hits. And rightly so – the performance of Shine, complete with a full troupe of acrobats, was one of the most entertaining things I've ever seen.

Drawing on two decades of songs (band leader Gary Barlow wrote the hit A Million Love Songsaged just 15), Take That mixed old and new with aplomb in this circus-themed show. Unlike some reinvented bands, they showed nothing but affection for their camp history. Clad in Marcel Marceau clown outfits, they performed some of their very earliest, poppiest hits with tongues firmly in cheeks and some impressively authentic early 1990s dance moves. Surprisingly, however, they did rush through their best song, Back for Good, relatively early in the concert, and there were a few slightly dull moments, mostly slower songs from the recent years. But the band's sheer likeability and evident, humble pleasure in being back on top carried them through a spectacular and ridiculously enjoyable show. ANNA CAREY

Galway Baroque Singers

NCH, Dublin

Haydn– Te Deum in C Hob XXIIIc; Mass in Time of War. Karl Jenkins– The Armed Man.

This programme paired wartime masses written two centuries apart by Haydn and by Karl Jenkins, whose 2000 The Armed Man – a Mass for Peacewas initially dedicated to the victims of the war in Kosovo.

Nice thematic balance, nice message, nice potential for stylistic contrast. But it's only nice on paper. It fails in the event because combining these works by the giant Haydn and by Karl Jenkins on supposedly equal terms is an endorsement that The Armed Mancan never deserve.

Does the piece work at some level? Yes, clearly for its many, many fans it does. But whatever it is about it that works for them, however positive and wholesome an anti-war sentiment it succeeds in stirring up, it comes packaged in cliche, in cheap tricks, in wearisome repetition, in sentimentality, in cheesiness.

Such aesthetic cheapness actually debases the subject of the evil, horror and suffering of war.

The evening's performance was compromised in a number of crucial ways. The Armed Man'sbest feature is its eclectic texts drawn from the Psalms, Kipling, Tennyson, the Hindu epic Mahabharataand elsewhere. But we couldn't actually read them because of the decision – "show"-style rather than concert-style – to turn down the house lights. Nor, very often, could we hear them either, as conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn appeared to prioritise Jenkins's loud, Hollywood war-movie orchestral effects over the communication of the words.

Nor did Ó Duinn do Haydn any favours, taking his mass at a spiritless gallop, like a meaningless amateur bout before the main event. It resulted in numerous unnecessary untidinesses from a choir that always prepares thoroughly. This didn’t occur in the Jenkins, where the level of engagement by both choir and conductor seemed far higher.

The night's highlight was postgraduate student mezzo-soprano Chloe Hinton, whose deceptively loaded understatement underlined the sincerity of the solo "Now the Guns Have Stopped". MICHAEL DUNGAN

Yang, Nathalie Clein

Beaulieu House, Co Louth

Bach– Suite in G BWV1007. Vivaldi– Sonata in E minor RV40. Villa-Lobos– Aria from Bachiana brasileiras No 5. Casals– Song of the Birds. Albéniz/Yang– España. Fye Dangerfield– Eggshell Walker. Piazzolla– Milonga del Angel. Café 1930. Falla– Canciones populares españolas.

Music for guitar and cello is not exactly thick on the ground. So this penultimate concert in the KCB Music in Great Irish Houses Festival inevitably included many arrangements.

The advertised programme was altered, and the result was more bitty than the original. Nevertheless, we heard a striking demonstration of the musicianship and duo-playing skills of Chinese guitarist Xuefei Yang and British cellist Natalie Clein.

From the opening notes of Bach's Suite in G BWV1007, it was clear that we were in for a treat of intelligent, subtly coloured cello playing. Clein's presence too, is almost as engaging as her sound – Augustus John's celebrated portrait of Guilhermina Suggia, with a smidgen of cello-playing Susan Sarandon in The Witches of Eastwick. On the debit side, her almost-perpetual intensity tended to iron out stylistic differences between pieces, and sometimes one might quibble with matters such as a rather hectic drive in Bach's Courante movement. But all that was amply balanced by a remarkable breadth of phrasing and by loving attention to detail.

Not all the arrangements were convincing. Although the guitar can be an effective continuo instrument, and despite the excellence of Yang's playing, one lost the two-line-duet aspect of Vivaldi's Sonata in E minor RV40. On the other hand, Yang's solo-guitar arrangement of Albeniz's piano suite Españasounded as if it were to the guitar born; and these players' arrangement of Falla's Canciones populares españolaswas as persuasive as the composer's own version for violin and piano. MARTIN ADAMS

Capuçon, Staatskapelle Dresden/Harding

NCH, Dublin

Schumann– Genoveva Overture; Violin Concerto. Brahms– Symphony No 2

The Staatskapelle Dresden is a great orchestra, comfortably ranked among Europe's top 10, and, founded in 1548, one of the world's oldest. This all-German, all-19th century concert was the grand finale to the National Concert Hall's 2008-2009 Sunday Business PostInternational Orchestral Series.

They looked different. Apart from splitting the second violins to the right, with cellos and basses in the middle, the conductor’s podium was placed appreciably right-of-centre, with the players looking more bunched around it than regimented in rows. No doubt this helps optimise their incredible richness and precision, the depths of harmonies always full-bodied in this venue’s bass-weak acoustic, the more melodic lines always clear and song-like.

To this fine machine add Daniel Harding, former Simon Rattle protégé, a young conductor who has combined early maturity with his even earlier, prodigious beginnings. This was so evident in his approach to the Genoveva Overture from Schumann’s lone opera – understated but missing nothing, telling the story in miniature, a story of triumph for a woman wrongly accused of infidelity.

Schumann’s Violin Concerto was rejected by Clara (his wife), Joachim (violinist, friend and dedicatee) and Brahms as the inferior product of failing faculties (the composer was in an asylum within months of writing it). Nor is the concerto like others of the period, for instance in the absence of a flying, virtuosic finale.

Today the piece remains a tough sell. But in a noticeably intense and ultimately persuasive collaboration, Harding and French violinist Renaud Capuçon made you forget that. Capuçon is a beautiful player, fully warm-toned but so clear and unfussy as to make it easy to imagine him playing Bach. Harding, as in the overture, avoided overstatement and embroidery, yet allowed the music’s inherent romanticism to speak loud and clear.

In fact, it was like a Brahmsian outlook brought forward a generation to Schumann. This made it a foretaste of how Harding would handle Brahms's Second Symphony, when he ensured primarily that the exceptional players in front of him afforded the composer the chance to tell his own story. MICHAEL DUNGAN