Reviews

Irish Times writers review Belfast Festival Concerts and Ryan Adams at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin.

Belfast Festival Concerts at Various venues

The Belfast Festival has been going through tough times. The fact that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, itself hemmed in by the British government's cultural funding policy, halved the festival's annual grant gives an idea of exactly how tough.

The classical end of the music programme is lighter in various ways. There's no late-night strand, no visiting orchestra, and the performers in the morning-coffee concerts are Irish rather than from abroad. But a serious attempt has been made to keep up appearances. and the first weekend managed to include no less than eight new works by Irish composers. That's not quite the overload you might imagine, as seven of the pieces had a combined playing time of under a quarter of an hour.

The pieces were commissioned as "Sonic Postcards" to mark the 25th anniversary of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, an artists' retreat much beloved of composers, for whom the tranquillity of the Co Monaghan countryside is an especial boon (there were composer complaints about noise as far back as the 18th-century, when Haydn was upset by the noise levels of bustling London).

The composers responded in very different ways in their snippet-like pieces. Nicola LeFanu's Postcard for Annaghmakerrig is faintly idyllic, Fergus Johnston's Lord Leonard Gray, His March (Lord Leonard Gray being a character in an opera-in-progress), slightly jaunty.

Rhona Clarke's From an upper window has an almost new-agey air, Kevin O'Connell's 90" for Annaghmakerrig is modernist, pointillist. Raymond Deane's Annaghmato is a punchy toccata with a gentle ending, Philip Hammond's . . . like music at night, distant, fading away, is ruminative, with fantastical twirls, and Siobhán Cleary's Son of a Red-haired Man pounds the keyboard with all the pleasure of that 1920s bad boy of music, George Antheil.

Maria McGarry's performances, in the sharp, dry acoustic of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, responded lithely to the pieces' very different demands. She was less fully at home in Beethoven's Sonata in C minor, Op 111, but sounded altogether finer in delicate, still performances of Chopin's Op 27 Nocturnes, and a typically insightful, almost incense-haloed account of Messiaen's Le Baiser de l'Enfant Jésus.

The big new piece of the weekend was Deirdre Gribbin's new percussion concerto, Goliath, a BBC Radio 3 commission which she has named after one of the Harland & Wolff gantry cranes, whose yellow outlines dominate so many views in Belfast.

Gribbin has introduced into the orchestra a pair of Lambeg drums, whose power of penetration is so complete that virtually everything in the orchestra and in soloist Colin Currie's stage-wide battery of percussion can be rendered into a secondary blur beneath them.

There's not much in the piece for the Lambeg drums other than being themselves, doing their own thing in spurts until everyone else accepts it. The sound in the confines of a concert hall was magnificent - raw, primitive, exciting and threatening - so magnificent, in fact, that it rather overshadowed the tireless efforts of the soloist, whose instrumental layout engaged him in theatrical runs across the stage to meet his cues.

The orchestral writing in Goliath seemed hugely problematic on a first hearing, constituting a kind of undifferentiated multi-purpose sauce which impacted on the flavours of the soloist's playing, often without providing a distinctive flavour of its own. This made the roughly hour-long piece seem even longer than it was.

Conductor Pierre-André Valade may bear some of the responsibility for the congealing of the Ulster Orchestra's playing. His approach to Hamilton Harty's Comedy Overture was decidedly overweight and unidiomatic. Charles Villiers Stanford's Irish Rhapsody No 5, however, took altogether better to the gravitas of his approach.

The starry opening concert brought a Belfast debut with the Ulster Orchestra for Argentinian tenor José Cura, one of those singers whose voice so fits him like a glove it gives him the freedom of movement of any well-fitting garment. He conducts, too, and not without skill.

The Saturday vocal recital was dominated by the musical promise of soprano Anna Devin. Her vocal partner, soprano Norah King, was uncomfortably unreliable in intonation, and Dearbhla Collins was strangely fallible at the piano. Michael Dervan

Belfast Festival: All Wear Bowlers at the Old Museum Arts Centre

Rarely does a production so completely live up to its rave reviews as this surreal show, which brings together mime with vaudeville, Laurel and Hardy with Vladimir and Estragon, absurdity with slapstick, illusion with grainy reality.

American duo Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle are the collective comic genius behind Rainpan 43, a company which has fashioned a distinctive theatrical vocabulary, described as "physical ventriloquism".

The two central figures in their story are Wyatt R Levine and Earnest Matters, a pair of bewildered, besuited, bowler-hatted innocents, lost in the desolate landscape of a black-and-white silent movie. In a desperate attempt to find their way somewhere, anywhere, they burst out of the screen, then rush back in again when their escape route catapults them into a room full of rows of people, staring silently at them.

There are few adequate words to describe what happens hereafter, as these two amiable characters struggle to plot a course through their bizarre situation. In the process, they uncover dark, grotesque recesses lurking both in their own characters and their relationship with each other.

Their baffling, quick-fire lexicon of physical, vocal and expressionist skills leaves the audience unsettled and disorientated, particularly those hapless members singled out for unwanted attention or involvement.

Yet Lyford and Sobelle steer a course that manages to keep the laughter on the right side of hysterical and the loud, prolonged applause from a packed house spoke volumes for its total appreciation of a brilliant and original one-off experience.

The Belfast Festival runs until Nov 4. Booking: 048-90971197. See www.belfastfestival.com Jane Coyle

Ryan Adams at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin

He may be the most talented singer/songwriter to emerge in a decade but Ryan Adams can be hard work. Two acclaimed albums - Heartbreaker and Gold - have been followed by a blizzard of other releases where quality control has clearly been a problem.

The prolific Adams released three albums last year. There are tantalising glimpses on all three of Adams at his best but little sense that he is breaking new ground. Ryan Adams seems stuck in a moment.

For all that, Adams is a bona fide superstar. He may have sold relatively few albums but at just over 30 he is already a member of America's rock aristocracy, feted on The Late Show with David Letterman and lauded as an alt.country king in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

This "secret" Dublin gig sold out speedily without any advance publicity and on Sunday night his fans were ready to pay homage.

Trouble is, Ryan Adams seemed strangely reluctant to connect with his fan base. Playing with his super smooth band, the Cardinals, he declared "let's go to work" as he played the opening bars of A Kiss Before I Go. These were prescient words. In truth, the entire gig appeared to be a bit of a slog.

Yes, there were some brief shining moments but Adams was subdued and self-indulgent. Between songs, he talked incoherently to lead guitarist (and impressive support act) Neal Casal and other Cardinals in a self-conscious manner which began to grate after a while. And Adams is very mannered on stage. At times he is the stoned-out rocker, stumbling around the stage, at others the arrogant rock brat superstar in his platform boots.

When Adams rolled out some of the old favourites from the Gold album, he seemed to begrudge giving the audience even a morsel of what they wanted. The band played pointless alternative versions of both New York, New York and Firecracker. Only Harder Now That It's Over was delivered in its original form; it was also the only song that really got the audience going.

Magnolia Mountain from Cold Roses was another highlight; a soaring reminder of his songwriting powers and his wonderful aching vocals.

But after this the concert never built any momentum. Bizarrely, Adams took a break near the end of the gig, declared that encores were "weird" and then returned for three more songs - before abruptly leaving the stage.

Ryan Adams is a major talent. One of these days he will release the stunning ground-breaking record he has always promised. But, on this form, the boy wonder of rock is enduring something of a mid-life crisis. Seán Flynn