Reviews

Irish Timeswriters give their views.

Douze Points Festival
Project, Dublin

RAY COMISKEY

For its second annual festival for young European jazz musicians, the Improvised Music Company ratcheted up the diversity quotient several notches and was rewarded with full houses, or close, for every night of the four-day event. And though the festival threw up no great revelations, its diversity was also, with one or two exceptions, musically rewarding.

You could infer from this that the jazz mantle has passed to Europe from its original American home, but US critics such as Bill Shoemaker have been decidedly shirty about that suggestion. What seems more likely, and the festival tends to back it up, is that European jazz musicians are comfortable within the broad stream of jazz tradition and their own folk and cultural norms - both are part of the scenery.

It does produce wide differences. Cologne's Shreefpunk, a brilliant quartet with an astonishing trumpeter, Mathias Schriefl, spent more time on musical jokes than anything else, and what emerged was a tiresome blend of Spike Jones and his City Slickers and Cabaret. On the other hand, Helsinki's lovely and individual Oddarang, using voices, cello, trombone, bottleneck guitar, bass and drums, was about composition, textures and moods. With feather-soft dynamics and reduced scope for improvisation, it was like a distant contemporary cousin of Chico Hamilton's 1950s quintet.

The Radio String Quartet Vienna used the classic format to address the music of John McLaughlin. Dynamic and brilliant performers though they are, it would require greater familiarity with the source music, personally, to know what fresh dimensions they gave it or what illumination they shone on it.

The festival offered two examples - three, if you count Italy's Giovanni Guidi Quartet, as its tenor saxophonist was essentially a peripheral figure - of the piano trio, the jazz equivalent of the classic string quartet. Switzerland's Urs Bollhalder Trio tastefully worked in a narrow emotional climate to the point of being one-dimensional, and while Guidi was more adventurous, he remains a gifted player still finding his own voice.

The third, Bourne/Davis/Kane, had perhaps potentially the greatest talent of the festival. Pianist Matthew Bourne is a maverick, a virtuoso for whom unpredictability is the default mode. He dominated the trio and, with wit and an almost undergraduate concern to confound expectations, tried to do the same to the audience. But what he did with the shards of Round Midnight was extraordinary, original and beautiful.

As befits a festival where there were no big names and no inconsequential awards decided by some arcane process of no interest, the focus was on the music. The groups, occupying various corners of the jazz tradition, were there simply because they were good at what they did.

And sometimes rather more than that. Working largely within the conventions of tonality, Luxembourg's Pascal Schumacher was a superb vibes player with a four-mallet technique à la Gary Burton. But in terms of groups, rather than individuals, apart from the Vienna strings perhaps the most impressive bands were the Saga Quartet from Vilnius, Justin Carroll's Togetherness and, with reservations, the Core, from Oslo.

Both the Saga and Togetherness had the tight, unified feel of working groups, drew on a wealth of original material and approached improvisation with a blend of freedom and structure. Aptly named, Togetherness's strengths included Carroll's compositions and playing, a bang-in-form Michael Buckley on tenor and the marvellously assertive but sympathetic drums of Sean Carpio, the ensemble anchored by Simon Jermyn's electric bass. The Core offered a brilliant high-energy take on late Coltrane; impressive playing, but relentless.

For the rest it was perhaps two cheers. Copenhagen's Ibrahim Electric was a rock perspective on the Hammond trio tradition, exciting and well done, but aimed at the groin rather than the head. And Tallinn's young singer, Kadri Voorand, is a definite talent but at the moment a generic belter rather than an individual one; and her penchant for scatting should carry a government health warning.

The festival overall? Douze Points? More like dix points. Here's to next year.

NCC, ICO/Layton
NCH, Dublin

MICHAEL DERVAN

The Irish Chamber Orchestra and the National Chamber Choir ended their short tour of Bach's St John Passion at the National Concert Hall. The benefits of the collaboration between two leading national musical institutions, so clear on paper, were less than fully in evidence on the night.

Conductor Stephen Layton opted for the brisk speeds which have become so fashionable in Bach's passions in recent years. But his handling of speed didn't always allow time for important detail to register, whether it was the import of the words, or matters of musical phrasing and articulation. He also too frequently allowed the members of the NCC to set on a course of emulating the weight and impact of the much larger choirs that are usually heard in this work. The result was an amount of straining that's unusual for these singers, as well as an unevenness within lines that sometimes allowed the sound of individual voices to protrude uncomfortably.

In fact, in virtually every area, this was a peculiarly patchy performance. There were unusual stiffnesses in parts of the continuo accompaniment. The Evangelist of tenor Robin Tritschler was at times so rushed it was as if he wanted to get to the end in a hurry.

Tritschler was commanding in delivery, but some of the other vocal soloists were less even, balancing extremely fine moments with others (particularly in the case of tenor Mark Wilde) that were altogether less stable.

Grant Doyle had the gravity for Christus, but not always the necessary richness of tone. Soprano Sylvia O'Brien showed easy and tonally attractive command of what was most overtly difficult, but sometimes created a kind of slurred consonant effect on short notes. The greatest consistency was provided by the resonant baritone of Benjamin Bevan and the eager counter-tenor of James Laing.

What the performance needed was a sense of flexible narrative purpose and a less forced approach to dramatic moments. Layton knew how to drive the music with urgency, and how to make a momentary impact. But there were too many strangely soulless sections in his reading of a supremely soulful work.

Vesselin Stanev
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

MICHAEL DUNGAN

Chopin - Allegro de concert, Op 46;
Nocturne in E flat, Op 55 No 2; Mazurkas, Op 24.
Liszt - Réminiscences de Don Juan.

Bulgarian Vesselin Stanev presented a 60-minute programme devoted to two 19th-century champions of the piano, Chopin and Liszt. He included the rarely played Allegro de concert, Op 46, a relatively late work which may once have been the beginnings of a third concerto. "Tutti" and "solo" markings in the score add weight to the theory, and there are passages of great virtuosic difficulty in keeping with the concerto style of the period. A Nocturne in E flat - not the famous one - and the Op 24 set of four Mazurkas rounded off the Chopin.

Stanev's long, single work from Liszt was Réminiscences de Don Juan, a combination of fantasy and variations on themes from Mozart's Don Giovanni which the Hungarian composer wrote and performed during his years as a travelling virtuoso and celebrity.

Stanev was at his best tossing off hundreds of notes in radiant cascades and mighty fistfuls at high speed and with apparent ease. The orchestral effects in both the Chopin Allegro and the Liszt gave plenty of opportunities for this kind of playing, which he delivered without the slightest physical suggestion of grandstanding.

He brought the same facility to the Nocturne and Mazurkas, although these were characterised by lack of forward momentum, so their overall shape was hard to discern. This sometimes led to a stodgy effect and dulled the shine of Stanev's technical flair.