Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events.

Palestrina Choir, OSC/Murphy

St Ann's Church, Dublin

Andrew Johnstone

Bach - Cantatas 96, 114, 148.

This week's concert in the Orchestra of St Cecilia's ongoing survey of Bach's church cantatas was an annual appearance in the series for the Palestrina Choir.

As resident ensemble at the Pro-Cathedral, this group might not place Lutheran sacred music among its core activities. But its considerable experience with Latin polyphony contributed to confident handling of Bach's complex counterpoint.

With the upper two parts sung by boys, and the lower two by mostly young adults, the choir's abundant sound brimmed with breezy enthusiasm.

Bass soloist Jeffrey Ledwidge was satisfyingly mature of tone in his one recitative and in Cantata 96, an all-too-short aria of a distinctively dark yet dance-like character.

In addition to four official contralto solos, the versatile Alison Browner dispatched two designated for soprano, effortlessly disclosing her usually unheard capacity for a top G. Her regular range proved a fair match for some weighty woodwind accompaniment in Cantata 148.

The most formidable solo vocal challenges fell, however, to tenor Robin Tritschler, for whom each of the cantatas presented a stringent and extended da capo aria. It was on his return to the beginning of each of these that his steel best showed itself.

Two of Tritschler's arias were with flute obbligato, and in their middle sections conductor Blánaid Murphy seemed to be mediating between ultra-secure instrumental playing and more pressing vocal requirements.

Something similar had happened too in the opening chorus of Cantata 96, where the potentially dance-like tempo was kept to a slow swing.

But in both other opening choruses, Murphy realised images of busy and crisply urgent celebration.

Jinx Lennon

Sugar Club, Dublin

Peter Crawley

He takes to the microphone with the verve of a motivational speaker and the hellfire rhetoric of a street preacher. Even Jinx Lennon's more positive thoughts sound splenetic and embattled, his punchy rhymes warning us about all those who would keep us down ("the salamanders of slander, the shite hawks of shite talk"). We are still at the introduction stage of the gig, but Lennon has started as he means to continue, with a torrent of invigorating bile and often incantatory poetry.

His first song, Balaclava Boys, is a neat illustration of a grubby social realism that quickly pirouettes into ludic verse. Performing solo, Lennon spits out a terse and mordant account of an attack by masked thugs outside a chip shop, delivered over a dirt-simple blues-rock riff. Whatever gravity it holds for his love-hate relationship with Dundalk, though, the scene is punctured by giddy doggerel ("Oo-wee, Miwadi, good golly, Mr Blobby") as though, eventually, only the sound matters.

An excellent stripped-down rendition of City of Styrofoam Cups, from Lennon's recent album, Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!!, is considerably more advanced. With his voice pitched louder than his guitar, he screws his eyes shut and emits a disorientating cascade of bleak imagery. Punk-folk is the term most frequently used to encapsulate Lennon, but the rhythm of the words here owes more to rap or the spoken word tumble of Gil Scott-Heron.

That may put Lennon in the bracket of socially conscious troubadour, but his politics are a bit more askew: Protect Yourself at Home is an exhortation to defend yourself from burglars by any means ("you should be entitled to stick a knife in their eye"), while Stand Up For Your Hospitals or Nigerians (Don't Give Out About) are more simple rabble-rousing protests.

Paula Flynn is Lennon's natural foil, appearing intermittently to counterbalance his raw hollering with a voice as delicate and worn as torn silk. Together they perform duets, none better than Escape From the Planet of the Apes, which, in its unconventional hymn, suggests that we can slip the surly bonds around us rather than just shout them into submission.

Steinbacher, RTÉ NSO/Bellincampi

NCH, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Ronan Guilfoyle - Synapsis. Shostakovich - Violin Concerto No 1. Tchaikovsky - Symphony No 4.

Ronan Guilfoyle took the title for his latest orchestral work, premiered at the National Concert Hall, from an e-mail he received from a friend. He liked the sound of the word "synapsis" and also the way it seemed to combine synapse and synopsis.

I hadn't encountered the word before meeting it in Guilfoyle's title, and when I looked it up found that its primary meaning has to do with the pairing of chromosomes. The relevance to Guilfoyle's work, however, is the synapse connection, which caused the composer "to imagine the orchestra as some kind of large brain across which ideas could pass in different directions".

Synapsis falls into three sections, each with a synapse theme. The piece evokes big-band jazz and shows a tendency to fall back on jagged percussion writing when it's in danger of running out of steam. The most interesting section is the first, which occasionally creates the effect of a large, dysfunctional machine, loping unevenly.

Conductor Giordano Bellincampi's handling of the piece didn't really have the sharpness or tightness the music seemed to call for, but his handling of the evening's other two works had no such shortcomings.

Standing ovations are real rarities at Friday night NSO concerts. But the playing of Arabella Steinbacher, making her NSO debut in Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, brought a sizeable proportion of the audience to its feet.

From the plaintive solo cantilena against the orchestra's sombre growling in the Nocturne of the opening movement, through the vicious snap and bite of the wound-inflicting Scherzo, the temporary balm that opens the Passacaglia to the high-voltage energy of the closing Burlesque, Steinbacher played with astonishing concentration, and Bellincampi was unwaveringly supportive.

In Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, which closed the concert, Bellincampi gave the music time to breathe, and gave the orchestra the space in which to reveal the music's inner workings. The performance was unusually balanced and sober, yet still emotionally powerful..

Chamber Orchestra of Europe/Schiff

NCH, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Mendelssohn - Hebrides Overture. Schumann - Introduction and Allegro Appassionato. Mendelssohn - Piano Concerto No 2. Schumann - Symphony No 2.

In different ways on either side of the Atlantic, the closing decades of the 20th century saw a redefinition of the potential of a chamber orchestra. In the US, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra took the exploration of conductorless working to new heights. And the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE) injected new life into the idea of an orchestra of soloists that still finds a role for a coordinating maestro. Both orchestras have a string of successful recordings to their credit, and the COE's landmark cycle of the Beethoven symphonies under Nikolaus Harnoncourt has notched up sales of close to a million copies.

The COE's programme under András Schiff at the National Concert Hall was a tightly focused affair, with works written by Mendelssohn and Schumann in the 1830s and 1840s, offering one purely orchestral work and one work with piano solo from each composer.

The electricity the COE can generate was nowhere more apparent than in the closing work, Schumann's Second Symphony. This was a performance with a full-on energy and a frequently astonishing agility to make the regular efforts of larger orchestras seem musclebound by comparison. Schumann's orchestral works still suffer taunts about opacity caused by the excessive doubling of instruments in the orchestration, and his Second Symphony benefited hugely from the quicksilver adaptability of the COE players and the always imaginative drive generated by Schiff.

This was a performance that showed an uncanny chamber-music-like adaptability and give-and-take. The playing was excited and exciting, tender and flexible, visionary and ardent - in short, just the kind of romantic maelstrom that Schumann surely intended.

The first half of the programme didn't reach quite the same level.

Schiff rose to the demands of velocity in Mendelssohn's piano writing with style and infectious brio, and he was sympathetically probing in Schumann's elusive Introduction and Allegro Appassionato. But these were the kind of performances where the actual brilliance of the delivery ended up leaving a stronger impression than the music itself.

Schiff offered a highly polarised view of Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, relaxing the Allegro moderato of the opening so that it had an almost adagio-like feel and then winding things up with a frenetic edge.

There were extremes, too, but fully convincing ones, in the two encores, a delectably deft account of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, and a gorgeously relaxed unveiling of the entr'acte in B flat from Schumann's Rosamunde music.

The captivated audience, I suspect, would happily have listened for half the night if more had been forthcoming.