Reviews

More reviews from The Irish Times

Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra

NCH, Dublin

The sheer scale of the impact of Hungarian folk music on the classical music canon was the most striking discovery of the Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra's performance in Earlsfort Terrace on Monday night. Brahms' Hungarian Dance No 5, Johann Strauss' Hail To Hungary and his Radetzky March, apart from conjuring another world where empires sabre-rattled at one another, offered pristine snapshots of the unashamed musical cross-fertilisation that any composer worth his salt engaged in throughout the 19th century.

The Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra didn't bring all of their 100 members to Dublin, but the 70 or so who populated the concert hall stage brought no small helping of vim and vigour with them. Hungarian folk dances, or czardas, laden with melodrama, invoked a world apart, where woodland flings and vivid costumes punctuate daily life with all the casual energy of lives lived communally and in sync with one another.

Oszkar Ökrös, the lead cimbalom (or dulcimer) player stole the night with a fervent display of taut rhythms, creating a great fissure of sound that segued effortlessly with cello and violin on Horvath's Gypsy Fire. First violinists Belá Berki and László Berki jnr brought a theatrical flourish to bear on an unashamedly safe and predictable repertoire that included Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, Bizet's Carmen and Strauss II's Kaiser Waltz, accentuated by the sylph-like clarinets of Dezsö Balogh and András Puporka.

While the violins favoured typically gypsy patterns of floating in the upper reaches of the octave (epitomised by a protracted exploration of Grigoras Dinicu's The Lark, replete with countless solo violin flourishes, each trying to outdo the others with its avian conjurings), there was little of the athletic, unfettered freefall that characterises gypsy music in its raw state in evidence. In symphonic form, the music felt constrained by the conceits of the classical form, not quite gagged but inhibited nonetheless.

Siobhán Long

Touring this week

Dickie Rock

Vicar Street, Dublin

He may have left his mic-throwing days behind him, but Dickie Rock still knows how to pack 'em in. Perma-tanned, besuited and more than a tad bewildered by the enduring passions of his own audience (most of whom lip-synched to everything from his back catalogue, from 1963 onwards), Rock rushed headlong into a set list worthy of the most seasoned of Vegas entertainers.

He cut a surprisingly awkward figure on stage, with dance steps so wooden they could be planed down and used for flooring. Only when he eventually hit the mambo rhythms of Barry Manilow's Copacabana did those limbs loosen up enough to let him swivel his pelvis east and westwards. The voice is in fine fettle: a robust, strapping instrument that cuts a workmanlike swathe through Love Is in the Air, You're Just Too Good to Be True and Strangers in the Night. Rock isn't much of a man for colour and shade, but he does a neat line in pummelling his repertoire into shape. His cover of Van Morrison's Moondance left the song for dead, as he nonchalantly dispatched its nuanced jazz lines, replacing them with a line in uncompromising, hard-nosed lyrics and a brass line so weak it cried out for a blood transfusion.

Rock's is a hidden constituency, one that knows the real meaning of loyalty and devotion.

The only thing that's changed is that "spit on me Dickie" has mutated, in time for the noughties, to "Yer a bomb, Dickie", but if they'd tossed out the cocktail tables in Vicar Street, there'd have been hundreds of ballroom dancers filling the void in milliseconds, such was his conjuring of times past, a world apart where dances were asked for and the right of refusal loomed large over every request.

Rock's on-stage personality is as monochrome as his two-tone shoes, but his audience wasn't there to hear him banter. He's not one for inhabiting a song, but he can deliver it with obstetrical precision, to order. His huge fan base got what they came for: an amble down the backroads to a time when candy stores were still on the corner, where they willingly succumbed to Simple Simon's admonitions to put their hands on their hips, and where they could queue up to shake their hero's hand, with Lourdes-like fervour, even while he was belting out his back catalogue.

Siobhán Long