Reviews

Irish Timeswrite review Regina Spektor at Tripod and a lunchtime organ and harp recital at the NCH.

Regina Spektor, Tripod, Dublin

It is now possible that there are more people who dislike Regina Spektor than who actually know who she is. This owes little to her considerable charms and ability and more to the contemptuous familiarity of advertising.

That "Come into my world" jingle you have not escaped is lifted from her Hotel Song, an otherwise blamelessly good tune which contains airy references to Class A drugs.

That's the beauty of Regina Spektor, the Muscovite turned Manhattanite whose music reverberates with cultural clash; her songs may endear themselves to mobile phone companies, but their sentiments are just as likely to rile parents' groups. In a jam-packed Tripod, though, Spektor gets nothing but love.

"I can't cry during the first song," she repeats to herself before On The Radio is finished, and, short of resorting to squawking free-jazz and starting a log fire, there is nothing she can do to sweat out the crowd's ardour. Performing solo, Spektor is always the right side of kooky, her quirks unaffected and her delivery pleasingly difficult. Although classically trained, she will often play her grand piano like an electric guitar - all chunky chords and soaring sustain - then plays her guitar as though she's strangling a chicken.

You hear plenty of that purposeful punk spirit in the words of Baby Jesus, but less in Better, a consoling ballad from her over-produced breakthrough record Begin To Hope. In fact, the real pleasure of the gig is to hear those songs stripped down and scuffed up.

The menacing Après Moi, in which her lightly smoked voice is punctuated with hiccups or sudden retches, and the tainted daydream of Music Box are Spektor at her most unadulterated - which is to say, slightly adulterated: no patina of sweetness will mask her sour reflexes.

After that she can do no wrong: Summer in the City, the irregular surge of Poor Little Rich Boy and her unavoidable hits Hotel Song and Fidelity all straddle that curious Spektral divide between near-embarrassing accessibility and visceral excitement. You might blush to admit it, but she gives you goosebumps all the same. - Peter Crawley

Malir, Caulfield, NCH, Dublin

Bach - Fantasia on Komm, heiliger Geist BWV651. Adagio from BWV1060

Grandjany - Aria in Classic Style. Alain - Variations on a theme of Clément Jannequin. Le jardin suspendu. Litanies. Handel (arr. Easdale) - the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Debussy - Claire de lune. Gliére - Finale from Harp Concerto.

The amount of music written for organ and harp is small, so this lunchtime concert inevitably included a number of arrangements. In one of these the results were merely odd. Brian Easdale's arrangement of Handel's The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba jogged along nicely, as it should. But it never quite comes to grips with the roles of organ and harp in relation to one another or to Handel's orchestral original.

That was a minor blip in a pleasing concert, shaped by musicianship that was never less than reliable, and was often very subtle. Those strengths were evident in the solo works for each instrument. Fergal Caulfied's playing was suitably characterful in works by Alain, including a scintillating account of the celebrated Litanies.

Andreja Malir played an arrangement of Debussy's Claire de lune that, more than any other of the arrangements in the programme, sounded as if it could have been written for harp in the first place.

The only original work for this combination was Grandany's Aria in Classic Style, a neat confection that sounds as if Elgar, in salon mode, had appropriated the celebrated Albinoni Adagio for Organ and Strings.

Confection of a more robust kind was offered by the concert's last item, the Finale from Gliére's Harp Concerto.

The main rondo theme and its treatment were almost familiar - as if Saint-Saéns, perhaps, had written a rondo on Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith harpsichord theme.

Both players gave an excellent account of this light and engaging piece, with good balance and ensemble throughout, and with the organ doing well at what it did regularly until comparatively recently - imitate the textures and colours of the full symphony orchestra. - Martin Adams