A look at what is happening in the world of the arts.
Little, RTÉ NSO/Brophy
NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Symphony No 25. Walton - Violin Concerto. Ian Wilson - Licht/ung. Elgar - Enigma Variations.
Friday's RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra programme under David Brophy presented a well-chosen series of contrasts. Mozart's Symphony No 25 in G minor is the work of a 17-year-old who, after a thorough and respectable apprenticeship, has suddenly found his full stride in the world of the symphony.
William Walton's Violin Concerto was written for Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of the age, who, with the composer's consent, added some difficulties to the solo part ("jazzed it up" was Walton's description).
The work blends a backward-looking melancholy romanticism and a thoroughly up to the minute fractured rhythmical writing in a way that allows it to belong to two traditions.
Ian Wilson's Licht/ung was written "after seeing some work by the Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu, pictures of Nagasaki and some of its residents 16 years after the atom bomb explosion".
The mood of the piece is one of foreboding, punctuated with heavy, percussive convulsions, with chords of low, threatening brass, like a barely contained braying, the whole work having a fractured style, like an effects piece from the 1960s.
David Brophy's no-nonsense, matter-of-fact approach served all three works well. In the Mozart, he brought the orchestra's style more fully into the spirit of the 18th-century than most conductors manage. In the sensitively balanced Walton, his slightly distanced approach was a nice foil to the warmth of feeling generated by the soloist Tasmin Little. And he kept the Wilson on an appropriately firm and threatening trajectory.
There were plenty of sparks, too, in the closing work, Elgar's Enigma Variations, done without the shuddering support of the optional organ part. Brophy's coolness here, however, allowed some of the whipped-up climaxes to sound shallow in effect, and deprived the ever-so-soft Nimrod variation of its deeply stirring potential.- Michael Dervan
Guillemots
The Village, Dublin
With a multi-national line-up, a keen sense of time and place and a Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut album Under the Windowpane, Guillemots are coming for our hearts and minds and we'd be well advised to hand them over without protest.
The crowd at Dublin's Village have already surrendered to the band's soaring tunes and literate lyrics that evoke times not so long past, and feelings not so soon forgotten. This was the first date of the band's tour of Britain and Ireland, and though the show was dogged by technical problems, it was definitely not damned to faint praise.
Leader Fyfe Dangerfield aka Fyfe Hutchins is a one-man whirling dervish, spinning between his keyboards and guitar, and juggling an arsenal of sounds like Doc Octopus going to battle with Spider-Man. His vocals often swoop to dizzying heights, but happily fall short of self-indulgent. Brazilian double bass player Aristazabal Hawkes brings a jazz-classical tinge to the sound, and tonight makes her lead vocal debut, her singing voice hovering somewhere between Bjork and Bic Runga.
Guitarist MC Lord Magrao tears out sonic shapes that seem at first at odds with the songs, but which turn out to make perfect, jagged sense. Add Grieg Stewart's thundering drumming and the squall of sax and clarinet, and it's surprising that the band manages to keep it together at all.
Inevitably, there are glitches: a strange, fluttering sound fills the air; Dangerfield's keyboards take a sudden vow of silence; the intro of Trains to Brazil shudders to a halt. But amid this beautiful chaos, the songs shine brilliantly: Made-Up Love Song #43, We're Here and the forthcoming single, Annie Let's not Wait - pop songs that hoist you up by the heart and set you down in a better, less cynical place.
The band finishes with the raucous Sao Paolo, Magrao spraying fire from his guitar, and the entire band picking up various percussion instruments to bring the song to its stone-skimming climax. - Kevin Courtney
The Dears
The Village, Dublin
For many years, The Dears have been Montreal's best-kept secret, soaking up acclaim at home while Arcade Fire and Toronto's Broken Social Scene have made it big abroad. After 2004's No Cities Left and the recent release of Gang of Losers, however, The Dears' profile has begun to go in the same direction as their compatriots.
In comparison with those other two acts, however, The Dears are a derivative disappointment. Frontman Murray Lightburn looks like a slimline Barry White, with sharply tailored suit and red cravat. The two keyboardists, including Lightburn's wife Natlia Yanchak, appear to have stepped straight out of a Robert Palmer video.
The rest of the band, with Patrick Krief on guitar, Martin Pelland on bass and George Donoso on drums, look like a Strokes tribute band.
Instead of the lush, orchestral pop rock they are renowned for, however, all they manage to produce is a muddy mess. Lightburn's vocals, so reminiscent of Morrissey and Damon Albarn on record, are conspicuous here by there inaudibility. The set is so badly mixed, it's hard to tell if anything is coming out when he opens his mouth.
The gig seems designed for lip-readers - for all the audience can hear, he might as well be reciting the Argos catalogue.
To compound the awful sound, The Dears appear either studiously bored or exhausted - the cups of coffee that discreetly litter the stage indicate the latter. Only Donoso looks to have any energy, and he is the only band member who seems to care about the bad sound.
So many of their songs ape turn-of-the-century Blur, it's a surprise they don't play Beetlebum as their encore.
In the event, their encore is a wildly self-indulgent wigout, during which Lightburn finally summons the energy to address the crowd. "You are far too kind," he says, in what sounds like a resigned acknowledgment that he and his troupe are merely going through the motions.
Some bands look better on MTV than on stage, and some bands sound better on record than in performance. On this evidence, The Dears appear to belong in both those camps. - Davin O'Dwyer
O'Loughlin, Ó Cuinneagáin
NCH, Dublin
Fauré - Les Berceaux. Beethoven - Sonata in G minor Op 5 No 2. Debussy - Cello Sonata.
For their lunchtime recital at the National Concert Hall last Friday, cellist Niall O'Loughlin and pianist Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin chose a short-and-sweet programme that was nonetheless long enough to include two quite substantial and contrasting items.
As well as the late sonata by Debussy and an early one by Beethoven, the duo played an arrangement of Fauré's song Les Berceaux. Over a rippling and flexible accompaniment, its melody was animated by a lively but not too wide vibrato.
There was care and moderation in all the execution. Ó Cuinneagáin attended thoroughly to details of balance, expression and passage-work, while O'Loughlin's surely connected line seldom strayed from secure intonation, and was complemented by agile and well- voiced pizzicatos, double stops and harmonics.
It made for a quite restrained reading of the Debussy sonata that de-emphasised the quirky characteristics of its second movement in particular.
The Beethoven sonata was similarly measured, its slow introduction kept nicely on the move by some temperate dotted rhythms, and the ensuing allegro molto più tosto presto getting a shapely rather than a precipitate treatment.
The good-humoured rondo finale, however, was played with less circumspection, and was all the more invigorating for it. - Andrew Johnstone
