Anna Carey was at Robbie Williams in Croke Park, Sean Flynn saw The Eagles at Lansdowne Road, Michael Dervan heard the Irish Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Tognetti at the NCH in Dublin and Tony Clayton-Lea was at the Metallica concert in the RDS.
Robbie Williams
Croke Park, Dublin
Floodlights flashed on, fireworks exploded in the air, and Robbie Williams popped up through a trapdoor in front of the stage like something out of a pantomime. It was the start of his European tour, and his dramatic appearance delighted the 80,000 fans who'd turned out on a gorgeous June evening to see the former "fat dancer out of Take That" strut his stuff.
There's been a lot of talk in the media lately about whether Williams's career is over - his latest single peaked at a feeble number 22 in the UK charts. But on the basis of his rapturous reception in Dublin and the fact that his tour has been selling out some of the biggest venues in Europe, it doesn't look like he has much to worry about. His fans aren't going anywhere.
Whether they should is another question. As the show progressed, two things became evident. The first is that Williams is a great showman who seems to genuinely enjoy performing and whose onstage banter seems charmingly unforced. During his encore, a mechanical prop didn't work, leaving him stranded on top of a giant crane, and he had to return to the stage via the stairs - but he handled the mishap with aplomb. "That was my Spinal Tap moment," he said. "Now for Stonehenge [the Spinal Tap song]."
The other thing is the more problematic fact that since the departure of his early songwriter, Guy Chambers, Williams's songs have become increasingly forgettable. He belted them out with gusto, but there wasn't much he can do to make Sin Sin Sin catchy. At the end he vowed to return to Dublin this year to do a free concert. Maybe the songs will have got better by then.
Anna Carey
The Eagles
Lansdowne Road, Dublin
It has been a long run since I saw the Eagles perform on a balmy summer's night at London's Wembley Stadium in 1975. Then, the little-known Eagles were tucked well down a bill that also included the Beach Boys and Elton John. The band may not have been shifting many albums (their breakthrough One of These Nights was released that week) but the critics and fellow musicians loved them.
Thirty years on, The Eagles are a commodity and a brand and, as frontman Glenn Frey told his Dublin audience, their manager has plans for them to keep playing when they are all dead.
The critics may have long since deserted them but the money is still raining down, with some $80 million (€63.47 million) in ticket sales last year.
So the omens were not good for the 35,000 or so who turned out for the first of two gigs - the Irish leg of the worldwide Farewell 1 tour - on Saturday night.
Unsurprisingly, this was a patchy performance. At times, the laconic duo of Don Henley and Glenn Frey appeared to be moving (very slowly) through the gears, but it was hard not to enjoy the gorgeous melodies of Tequila Sunrise or Hotel California. For all its faults, Eagles Inc is built on the strongest of foundations: some of the best popular songs of the last 30 years.
It helped that the famously grumpy Eagles were (relatively) talkative and gracious with their audience, if not with each other. Don Henley directed his anti-tabloid Dirty Laundry at Rupert Murdoch and asked one fan to put the Stars and Stripes to one side. We have already asserted our presence overseas quite enough, he observed acidly. Joe Walsh, the band's only natural performer, was witty and wild.
There were only two new songs - Henley's 9/11 hymn, Hole in the World, and Frey's No More Cloudy Days, inspired by David Gray's White Ladder album - but they seemed thin compared to the older stuff.
Some of the back numbers - The Boys of Summer and especially Henley's closing Desperado - still sounded remarkably fresh. Maybe that's because the band's influence can still be heard in everything from Ryan Adams to the Magic Numbers.
Maybe the Eagles are due a critical reappraisal before the Farewell 2 tour.
Some of the songs are still magical, but the band could help themselves by lightening up on stage and stepping out of corporate mode.
Sean Flynn
Irish Chamber Orchestra/Tognetti
NCH, Dublin
Janácek/Tognetti - String Quartet No 1 (Kreutzer Sonata). Mendelssohn/Tognetti - Violin Concerto in E minor. Schubert/Tognetti - String Quartet in D minor (Death and the Maiden).
The Irish Chamber Orchestra's new artistic director, Anthony Marwood, certainly showed the courage of his convictions in planning his first season. And that season, dominated by arrangements, went out with a bang rather than a whimper at the weekend, with violinist Richard Tognetti, director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, choosing a complete programme of his own transcriptions.
In the heyday of orchestral transcriptions the idea was to introduce audiences to aspects of the repertoire they might otherwise never have the opportunity to hear. Radio and widely available recordings have changed all that, but performers' fascination with transcriptions and arrangements seems to be on an upward curve at the moment.
Tognetti's programme offered the work most favoured in transcription by string orchestras, Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet, in the company of Janácek's First Quartet and a version of Mendelssohn's E minor Violin Concerto for solo violin and 10 strings.
Playing the Schubert with multiple instruments to a part rather straitjackets the music, even if you allow, as Tognetti did, some moments of freedom by reverting to solo instrumental lines. The pleasure of the music-making stops being that of the work Schubert created, and becomes something more akin to that of a display of mass gymnastics.
The ICO's discipline in the Schubert showed signs of first-rate drilling, and Tognetti encouraged some magical half-tones in the colouring of the slow movement. But the regimentation was mostly too strong to allow any significant emergence of Schubertian expression.
The opening Janácek quartet was, by comparison, rough and disjointed, the players struggling to stay together and find a unified voice in the face of such demanding and motivically fragmented writing.
The Mendelssohn was all spectacle, Tognetti pulling the solo part around mercilessly, like an actor hamming it up in a vain effort to rescue an impossible script, and engaging in frequent solecisms of rhythm and intonation in the process.
There was a great dramatic immediacy in some of the solo playing but, no matter how much the audience enjoyed the theatricality, there was no denying that the spirit of Mendelssohn got rather sidelined along the way.
A single encore, Astor Piazzolla's swooning Oblivion (another arrangement), revealed a potential between players and director that nothing else in the evening remotely approached. Even so, one could only feel that the ICO has now had a long enough dalliance with arrangements. It's surely time for an extended moratorium. How about 10 years to start with?
Michael Dervan
Metallica
RDS, Dublin
The second day of the Download Festival proved what a good, well-organised event something like this can be. It was self-contained within a confined, well-policed area, it wasn't exclusively for people of a particular age, and the spread of acts (although defined by one genre) was such that they had a cross-generational appeal.
This was why some of the more brutish bands down on the bill played in the "second stage" area; Sunday's minor support acts - Bloodsimple, Living Things, Wicked Wisdom, Ten Years - attracted the far younger male metal fan, most of whom seemed enthralled (if not a tad over-excited) to see movie star Jada Pinkett Smith (hubbie Will at the sound desk, no less) shake her wet hair like she just didn't care.
The more seasoned, subdued metal fan relaxed outside the "second stage" area and in the main arena, where the bigger support acts, such as Alice in Chains and Avenged Sevenfold, effortlessly bridged the gap in the schedule left by the sudden non-appearance of Korn (whose singer, Jonathan Davis, was hospitalised on Saturday).
It was left to Metallica, however, to conclude Ireland's inaugural Download with a set that was equal parts predictable and thrilling.
It was predictable insofar as the band had no new material to play (a new album surfaces next year, which they promised to return to Ireland to promote), and exciting in as much as they remain the pre-eminent metal act.
Unlike Friday's headliners, Guns'N'Roses, for example, Metallica never allowed their set to fall into a state of disrepair - they followed one bang-bang song with another, and then another.
But unlike other metal acts over the two-day event (Friday and Sunday), Metallica refused to use force as their solitary bludgeoning weapon. This is a band that can blend fluid guitar lines, melodic tunes, humour, kindness and generosity with the kind of doom-laden, gargantuan riffs that sound as if they were forged in the mines of Mordor.
They ended with (as is usual whenever they play Ireland) Thin Lizzy's Whiskey in the Jar, and everyone went home beaming, quiet, relaxed.
Don't worry, be happy. Maybe next year they should call it Upload.
Tony Clayton-Lea
