Irish Times writers review New York Dolls at the Village, Dublin, the RTE NSO at the National Concert Hall in Dublin and Souls of Mischief at Crawdaddy, Dublin.
New York Dolls at The Village, Dublin
They come complete with so many apparent rock'n'roll cliches you're initially unsure whether to take them seriously or laugh out loud: a 56-year-old lead singer with the face of Boris Karloff and the ass of Kate Moss, a brace of guitarists straight out of the School of Rock - all satin and tat and street urchin poses to beat Derek Zoolander to the catwalk post - and what was once de rigeur but is now sadly lacking in today's highly-expeditious rock music business - a slinky, long -egged young woman wearing lavender-toned, thigh-length boots and a matching mini-skirt.
The New York Dolls have returned to the land of the living and while the flesh is looking rather Hollywood made up under the spotlights, the music is so much the right and ragged side of glorious that any accusations of going through the motions can be immediately knocked on the head.
It's been a long journey back to the limelight - the inevitable rock'n'roll lifestyle has taken its toll on some original members, but the core duo of David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain are alive and spitting, helped along by new, younger members, patronage of sorts from celebrity fans (Morrissey in the audience) and a new record (One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This) that is so good it almost leaves the band's legacy of two lauded albums (1973's self-titled debut, and 1974's prophetically titled Too Much Too Soon) languishing in the gutter.
They play tunes from the mid-1970s glory days - Pills, Trash, Personality Crisis, You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory and others.
And then they play several new songs, stylistically similar yet invested with a type of second-time-around rock'n'roll bravado that gives more than a few fortysomethings a pep in their step.
Nostalgia? Only a tiny amount; for the most part the gig was contemporaneous, assertive, raw, good humoured, good-time stuff - music that tells you to feck off with a smile on its face. Tony Clayton-Lea
RTÉ NSO/Markson at the NCH, Dublin
Strauss - Four Last Songs
Mahler - Symphony No 2
There can be no pretending that Mahler's five-movement "Resurrection" Symphony is an easy work to bring off. Throughout about 80 minutes of music - a discursive and episodic first movement, two middle movements that are scarcely differentiated in mood, and a diffuse choral finale - the interest isn't always self-sustaining.
And the composer tackles his lofty themes - mortality, a life in retrospect, and Judgement Day - with a rhetoric that's long and loud, and can all too easily descend into bombast.
Conductor Gerhard Markson confronted these challenges most successfully at the start of the symphony, injecting rushes of explosive energy into the string basses' opening shudders that would motivate the entire first movement. He brought purpose and argument to its many-shaded malaise.
The remaining movements were impressive chiefly from a technical point of view, with few lapses from a taut ensemble.
From their initial sotto voce entry, the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir made the best of Mahler's strangely-wrought choral textures with some churchly yet discreet support from the organ. At full throttle, their well-blended fortissimo was an easy match for the orchestra's.
Catherine Wyn-Rogers took the alto solos, her rich mezzo-soprano and fresh diction bringing a ray of light to the symphony's fleeting penultimate movement. In the finale she proved an optimal counterpart to soprano soloist Franzita Whelan.
The audience responded to Mahler's affirmative epic with a suitably-scaled ovation.
There had also been enthusiastic plaudits before the interval for Whelan's superb rendering of Strauss's Four Last Songs. Cushioned by a notably luminous and luxurious accompaniment, her marvellously sustained and effortless projection radiated with affinity for the composer's valedictory intentions. Andrew Johnstone
Souls of Mischief at Crawdaddy, Dublin
Smoking ban, what smoking ban? Souls of Mischief's Opio sparked up a joint, had a good puff and then passed it to hands in the audience. Micheál Martin would be up in arms if he saw such blatant flouting of his legislation but I didn't spot him in the crowd.
Souls of Mischief came to show us how a collective of emcees can intertwine with finesse high-calibre rhymes.
From the bay area of Oakland, California, they emerged in the early 1990s, and were soon staking their claim as the most lyrically-driven crew on the West Coast. Their 1993 debut album, '93 Til Infinity, is even credited with initiating a new movement, "backpacker" hip-hop. It spawned a new generation of hip-hop fans, music for people from all backgrounds from the suburbs. With emphasis on freestyling, the crowd was kept happy.
Souls of Mischief are members of the loose underground hip-hop consortium known as Hieroglyphics. After their second album, No Man's Land, under-performed commercially they were dropped by their label but undeterred and to great success founded their own Hieroglyphics Imperium imprint
The beats and the cuts were kept fast-paced as the crowd bobbed along to a lengthy back catalogue of classics, all reassuringly G-funk-free. The night climaxed with the obvious, a rendition of '93 Til Infinity, a true anthem, and the crowd went nuts. An injection of the real deal from the golden days of hip-hop. Ali Bracken
