Arts Reviews

Fekete, Hungarian National PO/Kocsis at the Mahony Hall, Helix, Dublinis reviewed by Martin Adams as is the NCC/Duijck at St Ann's Church, Dublin. Nora Mulder at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin is reviewed by Douglas Sealy

Fekete, Hungarian National PO/Kocsis

Mahony Hall, Helix, Dublin

Martin Adams

Háry János Intermezzo - Kodály, All Things Depart, Midsummer Nights, The Pied Piper, O, Never Sing to Me Again, What Wealth of Rapture - Rachmaninov/Kocsis, Piano Concerto in B flat K595 - Mozart, New World Symphony - Dvorak.

The Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra makes you realise why you love music. Here, they gave a concert by people for people, so full of character that the odd wobble in ensemble or intonation was irrelevant. This orchestra has its priorities right, and its music-making is so much more healthy than our modern, precision-obsessed orchestral thinking.

The music director is Zoltan Kocsis, no stranger to Ireland as a front-rank pianist, but also a renaissance man of music - composer, conductor and arranger. He approaches everything with full-blooded commitment, communicates with the immediacy which can come when you conduct mainly from memory, and he explores each piece with a larger-than-life mix of subtlety and vigour.

In Mozart's Piano Concerto in B flat K595 he led from the keyboard a slimmed-down group of strings and wind, and contributed occasionally as a discreet continuo player - standard practice in Mozart's time.

His twists of ornamentation and flamboyant cadenzas sounded as if they were invented on the spot. This was Mozart as a passionate man, and even though the forcefully driven performance would not have been to all tastes, it was compelling.

Attila Fekete sang five Rachmaninov songs in virtuosic orchestral arrangements by Kocsis. They work, especially with a singer whose sound has a depth of colour one associates more with baritone than with tenor. This beautiful, richly coloured voice was used with serious intelligence.

Dvorak's New World Symphony came across not as the nostalgic dreaming of an elderly man in a foreign land, but as powerfully rhetorical discourse, with a vast range of feeling. The rhythmic life of folk dance was everywhere. Everyone played their hearts out. And they made music written 100 years ago sound as fresh as when it was new.

NCC/Duijck

St Ann's Church, Dublin

Martin Adams

Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst - Mauersberger, Tristis est anima mea - Kuhnau, Visdom og Galskab (exc) - Bo Holten, Herr, lass meine Klage - Schein, La complainte des âmes - Badings, Mein Gott , warum has du mich verlassen? Op 78 No 3 - Mendelssohn, Pentalpha - Raymond Schroyens.

a start to the National Chamber Choir's short winter series! Here, the first of these three concerts was conducted by Johan Duijck, who is currently in charge of the Flemish Radio Choir and the St Martin in the Fields Chorus. To this programme of music from northern Europe, ranging from 17th-century Germany to contemporary Denmark, he brought all the distinction one would hope for from such a pedigree.

It was not just that the niceties of choral technique were well done. Each work received treatment appropriate to the compositional style. So the contrast between Klagesange, from Bo Holten's Visdom og Galskab (1993) and Herr, lass meine Klage from Schein's Israelsbrünnlein (1623) immediately made the point that these pieces epitomise different concepts of musical expression, even though they set similar texts.

In the Holten, tone was as clean as a whistle; and this allowed the dense, dissonant clusters and the wide range of colours produced by adroit exploration of vocal registers to speak for themselves. In the Schein the sound was more earthy, driven by a rhythmic animation which made it sound exactly what it is - a paragon of Baroque rhetoric.

There have been several changes of personnel in the NCC, and it was striking that so many singers could give a good account of themselves as soloists, notably in Mendlessohn's Psalm setting Mein Gott, warum has du mich verlassen? Op 78 No 3.

This concert never flagged from the high standard set in the performance of the opening work, Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst, a moving and richly contrapuntal lament for the bombing of Dresden, composed in 1945 by the director of that city's Kreuzchor, Rudolf Mauersberger.

Alistair Bamford,

Nora Mulder

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Douglas Sealy

In the first recital of its autumn series the Association of Irish Composers featured Jennifer Walshe's moving in/love song/city front garden with old men, three poems by John McAuliffe. Her treatment of the texts is so unlike anything one is accustomed to hear that it made even the aggressive little piece by Harrison Birtwhistle that opened the recital seem almost old fashioned. Birtwhistle's Prologue to Punch and Judy was loud and hectoring, an attack on conventional values, but for Walshe such values do not seem to exist, or at best are irrelevant. Less challenging were Rodney Stone's florid setting of Cyril Tourneur, a sonnet by Swinburne, the surprisingly calm and harmonious Apokryph by Wolfgang Rihm, and the Trois Fragments de la Chanson de Roland, set in 12-tone language by Dallapiccola.

The five Drinking Songs, one each by Birtwhistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Colin Matthews, John Woolrich and Dominic Muldowney, were written to honour their wine merchant and were reproduced in his 1989 catalogue. Possibly they were intended to be humorous, but so resolute was the intention that there was far more solemnity than cheerfulness. Drinking is obviously too serious to be taken too lightly.

Jennifer Walshe's pieces require a prepared piano and various other little aids - a megaphone, a cymbal, a child's whistle, a pocket radio and perhaps other producers of noise. There were what seemed like lengthy silences while the piano, which didn't sound like a piano, underwent various alterations. Were the sounds of distant conversation, the occasional cough from the audience and other extraneous noises perhaps part of the composition? The Baritone, who had already shown his skill in several styles and languages (English, German, medieval French and Latin) had to move through the gallery, shout, whisper, gabble, moan and sing as well as make noises. The texts, basically about redecorating spaces long lived in by someone else, were not illuminated by the extraordinary sound world created by the composer; they may not have been annihilated, but they were reduced in stature. A state of lessness was achieved.