Ali Bracken was at DJ QBert in the Temple Bar Music Centre, Martin Adams saw One Fine Day at the National Gallery and Michael Dungan witnessed Petcu-Colan, RTÉ NSO/Eddins at the NCH in Dublin
DJ QBert
Temple Bar Music Centre
He might have been born just to scratch records. His earliest memory involves a hammer, a turntable and two worried parents. Mention his name and accolades come fast and furious.
It's not often you should believe the hype but in QBert's case resistance is futile. But then, hype and QBert have been synonymous since he won the DMC World Championship three years running in the 90s and it was rumoured he was banned from competing to give the other DJs a chance.
DMC denied this, saying at the time: "Don't believe the hype." The man himself remained tight-lipped about the whole affair. He was also part of the influential turntable crew Invisible Scratch Piklz alongside Mixmaster Mike of the Beastie Boys.
A frenzied scratchfest is what everyone showed up for and no one went home disappointed. But being labelled the world's supreme scratch DJ isn't all ego trips and posturing, you have to be a hard-working DJ to fight off contenders vying for that particular crown. It's the reason he still practises daily, searching for new, elusive tricks.
QBert chose a funk breaks set with regular scratch interjections. "I'm going to play some breaks for the b-boys," he said early on. The b-boys showed their appreciation with some imaginative breakdancing moves. Steven Power from Cabinteely, Dublin, held centre stage in the breakdancing circle with some inspired limb rearrangement.
Not content with available musical tools, QBert recently turned his hand to inventing and came up with the QFO turntable/mixer. It's a portable, compact hybrid all-in-one mixer-turntable and was developed by Vestex in 2004.
He invented it, he says, so that he could go to the top of a mountain and have a scratch whenever he felt the urge. He didn't bring the QFO to his Dublin gig, and spent much of it scratching furiously on just one deck, his trademark move. He finally left the stage after 3am despite a unanimous objection from the crowd.
Ali Bracken
One Fine Day
National Gallery
Poetry Ireland's contribution to the Beckett Centenary Festival grappled with the dilemma of combining poetry and music. For more than 400 years musicians and poets have declared that music should serve words. Yet music's sensuous power has an inexorable inclination towards the opposite.
This one-hour programme of readings and music was well-measured, and usually achieved a just and integrated balance. Devised by Michael Holohan, who wrote all the music, it was built around Beckett's shorter poems. Barry McGovern's readings had inherent musicality in their timing, tone and accent. Holohan's compositions were short, deliberate and calculated not to overwhelm memory or meaning.
The programme's title comes from Beckett's Brief Dream, which was also the final section of the concert's centrepiece, One Fine Day, a newly-composed cycle of 10 settings for a four-player ensemble - soprano, flute, violin, piano and percussion. Before each song the poem was read; and given the restrained character of the music one remembered those vivid readings.
Throughout the concert, which included Waves (1987) and The Snotgreen Sea (2004), the instrumental playing was reliable and was sufficient in expression. Anna Devin deserves special mention for the bell-like clarity of her singing.
The programme was framed by an arrangement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden theme. Surprisingly, this worked well, with a short version at the opening, and at the end a version whose greater length made it epitaphic.
Music occasionally pushed forward, notably in the setting of I Would Like My Love and in the Warlock-like, sensuous declamation of Terrified Again of Not Loving. However, on the whole this was a mixture of reading and music in which music's power did not overwhelm understanding.
Martin Adams
Petcu-Colan, RTÉ NSO/Eddins
NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Overture, La clemenza di Tito
Beethoven - Violin Concerto
Shostakovich - Symphony No 11
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra concluded its 2005-2006 subscription series on Friday night with a performance under principal guest conductor William Eddins.
And even though the season was ending, two of its programming strands - both featured in the concert - were not. Both the celebrations of Mozart's 250th anniversary and the survey of Shostakovich's symphonies will continue during the 2006-2007 season, details of which were announced from the stage at evening's end.
Friday night, meanwhile, saw the Shostakovich cycle reach No. 11, "The Year 1905". Its deliberate and graphic depiction of historical events distinguish it from the symphonies whose extra-musical references Shostakovich preferred not to reveal. Eddins nicely established, for example, the first movement's almost cinematic stillness in its strings-led evocation of the icy square before the Tsar's Winter Palace in St Petersburg. As he was obliged to do elsewhere in the work, the conductor made a good fist of sustaining the atmosphere in what unfortunately becomes quite a long-winded movement.
He also delivered on the explosive impact of the second movement with its depiction of the army's massacre of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators on January 9th "Bloody Sunday". This set up a poignant contrast with the funereal slow movement which is shot through with the revolutionary song You fell victims in the fateful struggle.
There were no such guts and glory in the concert's first half, only a sprightly account of the overture from Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, and Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Irish-Romanian violinist Ioana Petcu-Colan.
Her playing was a little short on extrovertism, perhaps either by brave choice or else dictated by insecurities exposed in occasional, brief inaccuracies in flying scale passages.
She made up for this, however, with grace and warmth, and with the sweetness and purity of her playing in the upper register. These qualities made the slow second movement a concert highlight.
Michael Dungan
