THE RETURN of the fine saxophonist Jean Toussaint attracted a capacity attendance for this Improvised Music Company concert last Monday, at which he was backed by Tommy Halferty (guitar), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass guitar) and Conor Guilfoyle (drums).
The first set was somewhat uneven, although there was some fine individual playing - Toussaint on Straight No Chaser and Conor Guilfoyle on Toussaint's First Kid. However, in Ronan Guilfoyle's stimulating arrangement of Wayne Shorter's Footprints, the group seemed to gell for the first time, with the juxtaposition of latin and four-feel exciting hugely creative responses from all the soloists, including a wonderful extended coda to round it off.
The second set opened, as the first had closed, with a lovely flowing composition by Toussaint, Glide, in which the composer constructed a wonderfully creative swinging solo, the use of simple melodic figures repeated rhythmically to great effect, with excellent support from Guilfoyle on drums in a straight-ahead style.
The musicians now relaxed with each other, Tommy Halferty opened Wayne Shorter's ballad, Infant Eyes, with a few delicate, choruses, before a fine Toussaint solo of poignant lyricism, at times reminiscent of the great John Coltrane.
REVIEWS
Virtuoso Trio
RDS
By MARTIN ADAMS
Trio in E flat Op 1, No 1 .....Beethoven
Adagio (Notturno) D 897 Schubert
Trio in E minor (exc) Shostakoviich,
IT IS encouraging to listen to very young musicians who have an apparently natural understanding of the first principles of chamber music performance. The members of the Virtuoso Trio - Aoileann, Ni Dhuill (violin), Hanno Strydom (cello) and Fionnuala Moynihan (piano) - are all second-level students and have been playing together since 1991, under the tuition of Constantin Zanidache at the Cork School of Music. Their music-making was notable for its sense of scale, for while most of the music on the programme thrives on the breadth born of experience, these players knew how to roam within a confined palette.
They finished the concert, with the Scherzo from Shostakovitch's Piano Trio in E minor. This forceful music strives to burst the boundaries of the medium and, although these players did not muster the power to do that, their natural shaping and clear balance had its own rewards.
In Schubert's Notturno movement D 897, the tendency to dwell repeatedly on upbeats ran against the music's spaciousness; but the subtle balancing of texture was better than I have heard from many more experienced groups.
The most well-rounded playing came in Beethoven's Trio in E flat, where it was refreshing to hear musicians for whom musical values were far more important than the projection of individual egos. For all Beethoven's grandiloquent gestures, this is salon music. The pacing and textural balance of this performance fitted that background.
