Adele

Crawdaddy, Dublin

Most young female singer songwriters have to deal with a barrage of shrieks and screams throughout their sets, but not Adele. Her music is of a much more refined character, so while Duffy presumably had them rocking in the aisles in the Academy, Adele was treating a packed-out Crawdaddy to her soft and sultry tones. And what tones. Smooth and solid as a hammer wrapped in velvet, Adele has no problems with her vocal. She kicks off tracks in odd, awkward keys without taking a note from any musician, and rarely does the texture or timbre of her range falter. She avoids the melodramatic tremble that seems to be the scourge of female vocalists and holds the notes as strong and true as a blow to the head, to gorgeous effect.

The accompaniment is pared back to basics, with some very sweet guitar playing and atmospheric keys adding up to a solid section. A full band, though, could quite possibly bring the house down.

In contrast, Adele's between-song banter is as raw as ropes, all self-deprecating diva-derived aspirations and blithe nonsense, which has the audience in stitches. But the music is polished, if a little too inoffensive; saccharine Bob Dylan cover To Make You Feel My Love fits right into the set, but blues toe-tapper That's It, I Quit, I'm Moving On by Sam Cooke is a welcome departure. Expect to watch an awful lot of on-screen break-ups to Adele's svelte singing.

The only major flaw, and this proves almost fatal, is the set length, which clocks in below 35 minutes. Barely half an hour for an up-and-coming act in a set that has several covers is unacceptable. Adele has talent, confidence, and puts most other vocalists in the shade when it comes to delivering the goods. What she doesn't appear to have is a repertoire that can fill a set out, and most of the grumbling audience left this gig feeling very short-changed indeed.
- LAURENCE MACKIN

Also reviewed on March 4th 2008: Frankenstein, Suedehead, Dublin Bach Singers and OSC/Murphy

Frankenstein Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein almost 200 years ago, she could never have envisaged the uses the future entertainment industry would put it to. The cinema underpinned its survival, with actors like Karloff and de Niro bent on blood-curdling - but theatre is another matter.

The London-based Love & Madness touring ensemble brought their version to Ireland, and it was a pity to see the story reduced to the level of a rudimentary melodrama, further diminished by low-flying acting and production values. Their approach is to hew faithfully to the original, the work of an 18-year old girl, and they achieve the simplicity they seek all too well.

We get young scientist Viktor Frankenstein creating artificial life in the shape of his Creature, which escapes and, rejected by all who encounter it, goes on a killing spree. It meets Viktor again, demanding a mate to ease his burden. When his creator fails in this, the Creature takes its revenge on his wife and then him, before heading off to commit suicide. All this and more is presented through acting that signals inexperience through uneasy hand movements, vocal deficiencies including inaudibility, and inadequate role integration.

The script, for her first play, is by Catriona Craig, and offers little opportunity to develop her scenario in a way that might enable an audience to make the imaginative leap necessary to engage with it. Director Neil Sheppeck has a tough job - too tough - in marshalling his assembly for their task, but he has one impressive performance on stage. Craig Tonks offers a hulking, intimidating presence as the Creature, with a very bad eye - not someone to meet on a dark night.
- GERRY COLGAN

Suedehead Great Hall, Imma

A night gale rattled windows and squeaked doors around Imma's Great Hall, the commotion in almost perfect unison with the inner turbulence of the four dancers in Jodi Melnick's Suedehead. Melnick, a veteran of New York's downtown dance scene, has collaborated with Rex Levitates in the past and in Suedehead she had first-team regulars in dancers Jenny Roche, Grant McLay, Justine Doswell (joined by artistic director Liz Roche) and composer Dennis Roche. This aesthetic intimacy didn't create cosy and confident interactions, but individualistic movements that were gnawed with uncertainty.

Although the eponymous first single by Morrissey was the creative starting point, the first physical movements were more apt in setting out the stall: Doswell's closed-mouth retchings sounding like a furr-ball that was never regurgitated. Whereas Morrissey's lyrics might shrug off his fling as just being a good lay, in the dance there was simmering resentment, with performers spitting out "That pumped up f***er!" and "What a dick!" But Suedehead is more universal than just a platform for jilted lovers, and Melnick's rich choreography can take however big a metaphor the audience chooses to superimpose on the dance. Sometimes movement follows a Newtonian logic, at other times, such as a late solo by Liz Roche, it is constantly unpredictable, with liquidy limbs turning in on themselves in a stuttering soliloquy of uncertainty.

Unison quartets are in perfect spatial balance on the Great Hall's elegant red carpet, retained for this performance. It seems to muffle not just sound, but also the movement, which was mutedly upright, reinforcing the feeling that some things have been left unsaid.

Dennis Roche's music is well-paced, with long periods of apt silence, and Sinead Wallace's lighting mixes warm straw colours with bold washes of blue on the back wall. But it is Melnick's choreography that leaves the strongest sense: clearly articulate yet deliberately illusive. In the end there's a lingering air of dejection amongst the dancers - no cheap happy endings here - making Suedehead a work that is to be admired but maybe not loved.
- MICHAEL SEAVER

Dublin Bach Singers, OSC/Murphy St Ann's Church, Dublin

Bach - Cantatas 118, 25, 95, 47

Since, technically speaking, it's a motet, Bach's O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht BWV 118 didn't have to figure in the Orchestra of St Cecilia's 10-year survey of his 200 or so church cantatas. But happily, this gorgeous work has been included - and twice, for it exists in two differently instrumented forms.

It was with the alfresco version, with accompaniment for wind band, that conductor Blánaid Murphy opened the final concert of this year's cantata season. The pace was more moderate than in her ultra-sedate reading of the string-accompanied edition two years ago. The brass made a cold start of things, with rather more blare from the trombones than befitted the valedictory BWV 118 and the august opening chorus of Cantata 25. There was, however, a particularly suave contribution from cornetto player Alexandra Opsahl, the orchestra's special guest, in Cantata 95.

Murphy's Dublin Bach Singers treated their patron composer to an intentful delivery, with strongly consolidated passagework that was set in an easy flow, at the beginning of Cantata 47, by the tenors and altos especially.

The audience's understanding was enjoined for soprano Lynda Lee, who in a recitative, a chorale and two exacting arias, coped valorously with a sore throat that would have deterred many another singer.

A keenly buoyant Robin Tritschler (tenor) and a succulent, sagely prophetic Nigel Williams (bass) enunciated the remaining recitatives superbly. In the arias generally, however, the richly allusive orchestral parts seemed to be aimed less at mimetic realisation that at efficient execution.

That's it, then, for the OSC's eighth season of cantata concerts, and the question is beginning to be asked what will happen when the series ends in 2010. To a suggestion by artistic director Lindsay Armstrong that the whole cycle could be repeated, the audience responded warmly.
- ANDREW JOHNSTONE