Arts Reviews

Christina Aguilera Stripped performance at the Point is watched by Peter Crawley, Bob Geldof at Vicar Street is reviewed by Tony Clayton-Lea, Camerata Ireland Jazz in Whitla Hall, Belfast is attended by Dermot Gault and Italienisches Liederbuch in th eElmwood Hall, Belfast is also reviewed by Dermot Gault

Christina Aguilera, The Point

Christina Aguilera, or Xtina as some of her outfits refer to her, is clearly having a blast. Thrashing about to the ridiculously suggestive Dirrty in a leather jumpsuit that plunges open to about her pudenda, her grinding figure is highlighted with fluorescent lines of hot orange, crossing her chest and clustering in a large luminous asterisk over her crotch. This ensures her erogenous zones are easy to find in the dark.

Despite the astonishingly vigorous booty-shaking and a revolving wardrobe so wonderfully atrocious the fashion police might call in a swat team, her true incandescence is an unrivalled voice and a willingness to parody the "look-don't-touch" coquettishness of teen pop.

The dizzying range of that voice (now with much less honking) causes her fingers to flutter along her microphone as though pressing the valves of a fiendishly tricky clarinet. It is the voice of a jazz singer trapped in the body of a porn star.

Less invigorating, but oddly sincere, is her frequent giggling and a rambling patter about emancipation, equal-opportunities clothes shedding and "listening to your heart". "I'm 22 now," she informs us with the gravity of Methuselah.

Leaning heavily on her partly self-penned, muddled album, Stripped, the set immolates early chart candy such as Genie in a Bottle in throbbingly sleazy versions. Way better is a growling Fighter, blue eyes blazing out from under raven tresses, or the clever inversion of Walk Away's choreography, where a male pole-dancer torments both a hot and bothered Xtina and her audibly frenzied crowd.

Best of all is a demure reading of Etta James's r 'n' b classic At Last and a final, unadorned and rather gorgeous performance of "skin-deep" ballad Beautiful. Barefoot, Christina simply stands in jeans and white Tee and lets her larynx do the work. It is deeply sexy.  Peter Crawley

Bob Geldof, Vicar Street, Dublin

Still bolshie, self-aware, charming, funny, articulate and angry after all these years - oh, that all mature rock stars could turn out like Bob Geldof.

On home turf after some time away, Geldof is in garrulous form, a stick insect in a suit with a mouth full of stories that he occasionally dwells on for far too long.

Yet, with friends and family in the audience, perhaps Geldof feels he can talk for 10 minutes at a time between songs and get away with it - which he does via a mixture of his signature arrogance and humour. Of course, listening to one of the most articulate (if overly foul-mouthed) people around is never a bad thing, but the feeling that we're in a university debating hall rather than a music venue prevails throughout, with the songs a respite from the lightning storm of Geldof's thoroughly insightful recollections and musings.

He leaves the majority of the Boomtown Rats' songs to the last half-hour or so, which means the audience has to sit through selections from his solo work and his (effective) solo material with various bands through the years.

The Rats' tunes are the oldest, yet most of them bear the weight of their age well. Written at a time when brevity was uppermost, Geldof's mid-1970s songs may too clearly showcase their influences (Bruce Springsteen along with the class of 1960s UK pop, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison) but now, as then, they are performed with a kind of musical invective that is, if not relevant then certainly exciting. After the Rats' heyday it all went slightly askew, Geldof's solo work becoming ever more introspective and claustrophobic - it sounds as if he almost lost the will to impress or overreach, which is perfectly understandable given what he has so publicly gone through.

And yet, despite this, there comes across on stage a man only too willing to want to lose himself in the music, who wants to feel a specific something coursing through his veins in order to make his life somewhat more meaningful. Equal parts chat show and catharsis, we reckon Geldof achieved just that. Whether the majority of the too-polite, indulging crowd agreed is open to argument.  Tony Clayton-Lea

Camerata Ireland Jazz, Whitla Hall, Belfast

Rossini - Barber of Seville Overture Mozart - Andante from Concerto K467. Ravel - Tzigane - Pièce en forme de habanera. Kreisler - Liebesfreud. Tambourin chinois. Gershwin - Girl Crazy Overture - The Man I Love - It Ain't Necessarily So (arr Heifetz) - Rhapsody in Blue (original version)

Barry Douglas founded Camerata Ireland, which draws its players from both North and South, some years ago, and has been its musical director ever since. For the second half of this Belfast Festival concert, devoted to Gershwin, it gained some players and lost others in order to become Camerata Jazz. The main interest here was the original version of Rhapsody in Blue, as written for Paul Whiteman's band in 1924, apparently receiving its local première. It becomes a sharper and sassier piece than in the familiar orchestral version made later. Pianist-conductor Barry Douglas was obviously enjoying himself on this occasion, obtaining a relaxed, rhythmical swing in the overture to Gershwin's Girl Crazy and lively but carefully detailed playing in the Rossini.

In the opening passage of Ravel's Tzigane violinistic fireworks from the American-Taiwanese virtuoso Cho-Liang Lin had to compete with Halloween fireworks from outside the hall, and the soloist could be forgiven for sounding rather tense. But Ravel's Pièce en forme de habanera (a transcription of his Vocalise-Étude en forme de habanera) featured seductive tone as well as agility and Kreisler's Tambourin chinois sparkled. Barry Douglas accompanied both pieces on the piano, as he did Heifetz's transcription of It Ain't Necessarily So from Porgy and Bess, and performed The Man I Love as a piano solo. The programme note quotes Wilfrid Mellers' description of this piece as "the most moving pop song of our time", but it becomes something of a salon piece in this elaborately written piano version.  Dermot Gault

Italienisches Liederbuch, Elmwood Hall, Belfast

In recent years the classical Lied has featured prominently in the programmes of the Belfast Festival at Queen's. The tradition is maintained in this year's festival, and if recitalists here have tended to bypass Hugo Wolf, this concert made up for it by giving us his last collection, the Italian Songbook, complete - all 46 songs of it - to mark the centenary of his death. It is quite a lot of music to take in, even though most of the songs are very short. Many of these fleeting and deceptively slight songs would be difficult to programme on their own, but work well when placed in sequence; No 43 follows on naturally from No 42, for instance. There is little if any local colour, Wolf instead aiming at achieving an Italian spirit through lightness and subtlety.

Julius Drake was an ideal pianist, discreet but positive, combining lightness of touch with a good dynamic range, and above all capturing the suggestive quality of Wolf's writing. Lucy Crowe was a bright, clear soprano, excelling in the more skittish numbers. Wie lange schon was, as the composer asks, "not without humour". But she could also produce a creamy, seductive tone when necessary.

James Gilchrist did well in the more declamatory songs. In some vowel sounds the coloration of the voice was not what one would expect from a German Lieder singer, but the emotional Sterb' ich, so hüllt in Blumen was sung in a beautiful half-tone. Both singers paid exemplary attention to the words.  Dermot Gault