A giant red dragon looked very much at home in Kilkenny on Sunday night as the city reverted to its medieval self in a dazzling parade that brought this year's arts festival to an inspired conclusion.
A spectacular pageant led by a mad king in a nightdress, supported by dancing girls, ghouls, fish, human Chinese-lanterns, cheeky pillowfighters and even a wayward sheep drew on fairytale, magic, death-myths and relaxed audacity. The organisers went far beyond familiar Irish themes, and even further beyond conventional notions of militaristic parades, in bringing the finest of surreal European flair to this fantastical procession.
Kilkenny's narrow, winding Parliament Street, with its wonderful assortment of period buildings such as the arcaded Tholsel, provided the perfect stage.
The upstairs windows of various restaurants, with their bemused diners, seemed sufficiently interesting to attract Sarruga's monster-sized locusts as well as a gigantic green grasshopper of apparent sensitivity. A huge spider, operated by a smiling girl, trundled along while a large red-faced bee - or was it a ladybird? - hectored the crowd with the air of an exasperated town councillor. Drums and a throbbing, mobile sound-system added to the atmosphere created by the daring visuals and free flowing choreography.
Saturday shoppers had their routines interrupted by a pulsating red leech led down the same street by three Pythonesque keepers. Its small human face, with a gasmask snout, looked oddly vulnerable as it refused its official, tomato soup-like blood, which simmered on a wheeled contraption straight out of the Keystone Cops. The search was on for human blood-donors. Children shrieked as keepers moved through the crowd with a sinister gadget, a blood-donor detector.
Far removed from the travails of the leech was the very real squalor and pain of Bodo Kirchhoff's The MC of a Striptease Act Doesn't Give Up.
Directed by Patricia Benecke, and performed by Patrick Driver, this one-man show is about the filling of an extended wait for possibly "the very last of the classical striptease artists". The compΦre begins his task with a suggestive knowing that gradually descends into naked desperation. Having primed his audience for the arrival of "Andrea", the "artiste", the MC must rely on his inventiveness, cynical teasing and, ultimately, memory to while away the minutes as she fails to appear. He speculates, improvises and confesses; Driver conveys the sleaze and the shame. It is clear that Andrea "or Andreas" and her or his "small, enchantingly obscene gesture" swiftly become irrelevant as the MC emerges as a pathetic victim of a sick power-struggle with a mother who persists in asking "when are you coming to visit? When are you going to play Hamlet?" Much of the context is the quasi-sinister cabaret underworld of Otto Dix.
Kirchhoff, author of Infanta (Frankfurt, 1990; London 1992) has long been interested in emotional deformities and impersonal neuroses. This is a stark, fluent, slightly over-long piece. Driver's English chat-show-host delivery is at variance with the material which should be played in a German accent. I would have preferred more of Berlin and less of Blackpool.
Also undermining - at least Saturday afternoon's performance - was Driver's engagement in vulgar banter with the audience, which responded. I felt this rapport diminished some of the emotional dynamic he had created and lessened the impact of his final howl of despair - his moment in the spotlight.
Still, it was a good performance of a bizarrely vivid, even voyeuristic script that attempts to expose layers of psychological sexual debris.
As had Sri Lanka-born, now Canadian, Michael Ondaatje on the festival opening night, fellow Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod filled the Kilbride Suite at the Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel on Saturday evening. Between them they represent the extremely diverse nature of contemporary Canadian writing, particularly in the case of MacLeod, from remote Nova Scotia and also drawing on the rich source of his Scots ancestry. Yet this event coincided with a major concert, the Kilkenny Festival Baroque Orchestra performing at St Canice's, the largest medieval church in Ireland after St Patrick's in Dublin. The concert programme included CPE Bach's Concerto in D minor for Harpsichord played by Malcolm Proud and Bach's Concerto in C minor for oboe and violin. (See Michael Dervan's reviews on this page.) The programming clash highlighted the impossibilities of audience bi-location, even in a computer age.
St Canice's is a splendid cathedral, too noble to have to tolerate the souvenir shop juxtaposed with medieval funerary monuments including the double-effigy tomb of Piers Butler and his wife. State provision should be made for this building - it should not have to fund itself.
All the more galling was the discovery that the concert's delayed start meant that a committed sprint could have brought a MacLeod fan (example: me) from that event's end to the cathedral just in time for the final two pieces. But I only found that out the following morning. Some consolation is to be had from the fact Lyric FM recorded the concert for a future broadcast. Earlier in the festival another case of fraught time-mismanagement occurred when Graham Swift's reading clashed with the appearance, also at St Canice's, of one of Europe's great chamber orchestra's, Camerata Bern, led by the superb violinist, Christine Busch.
Both of these cases of grievous overlapping emphasise the fact that a world-class classical music programme such as this year's at Kilkenny - including as it did such marvellous Baroque concerts and recitals (as well as Jean-Guihen Queyras's magnificent International Chamber Music Series, which ranged from Beethoven and Schubert to Berg, Poulenc and Messiaen - not to mention Queyras's own beautiful Bach recital) should be showcased on its own by enterprising sponsors eager to secure the privilege.
Such a programme should not be contained within a busy arts festival in which, this year, the visual arts was uninspiring and the theatre programme was dominated - indeed, obliterated - by the genius of Conor Lovett's magnificent rendition of the Beckett Trilogy: classical music, while appearing to be overshadowed, in fact triumphed. "This year, the music programme proved it can hold its own in a multi-arts festival," said music programmer Susan Proud with polite understatement.
Children and adults delighted in Jim Jackson's Art Guffaw, a highly original blend of comedy, juggling-skill and imagination exploring our perception of art and, particularly, light and colour. His giant bubbles drifted across the stage like magic clouds. Bruce Springsteen-like, roots singer-songwriter Eileen Rose, ably backed by her powerful band, certainly had her audience dancing, eager for more. Still, if asked for festival highlights, aside from the Beckett, it is the classical music programme and the memory of Baroque violinist Maya Homburger revelling in the improvisational quality of Castello, a pioneer of sonata writing for solo instruments, and equally delighting in a Moffat sonata.
There is also the memory of the silvery playing of harpsichord virtuoso Malcolm Proud, or of oboist Marcel Ponseele, or that of cellist Queyras, while his wife Gesine Queyras, a somewhat diffident player, eventually impressed with her performance on Sunday at noon of one of Vivaldi's stronger cello sonatas, Sonata no 3 in A minor. The closing concert in St Canice's on Sunday evening offered marvellous playing of Ravel's finest, and most uncharacteristic piece, Duo for Violin and Cello, from Busch and Jean-Guihen Queyras.
Messiaen's intensely symbolic and profound Quartet for The End of Time was performed with awesome intelligence and subtle though palpable emotion by Queyras, who appeared utterly at one with the piece, as did violinist Priya Mitchell, clarinettist Ronald Von Spaedonck and the marvellous pianist Alexandre Tharaud.
It was exciting to hear Muffat played alongside his more famous Baroque masters such as Bach, Handel, Telemann and Vivaldi. Telemann's Trio Sonata as played in Duiske Abbey, Graiguenemanagh by Proud and co was a lively example of inspired Baroque ensemble playing. And so on, and so on.
So, the Kilkenny Arts Festival triumphed thanks to its classical music programme, served brilliantly throughout by possibly the finest group of musicians ever gathered in this country. While classical music should certainly be included in the main festival programme along with other music genres, such is its particular riches that it merits, indeed requires, a celebration all of its own.
