Reviews

Irish Times writers review RTE Cór na nÓg at the NCH, Muse at the Point and Opera Gala at the NCH Dublin.

RTÉ Cór na nÓg, RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Markson at the NCH, Dublin

Mahler - Symphony No 3.

When Mahler wrote his Third Symphony in 1895 and 1896 Brahms was alive and still composing. Grieg was pouring out Lyric Pieces for the piano, and Verdi, finished with opera, was writing sacred music.

Dvorák, the great success of the New World symphony just behind him, hadn't yet even started work on his penultimate opera, Rusalka, which will be seen at the Wexford Festival next June.

Mahler's Third is a world apart from what these older men were doing. It is in six movements, cast in two parts, the first movement alone running for over half an hour, a span so remarkable that few symphonic composers have since ever sought to breach it.

The RTÉ NSO's past performances of this remarkable work foundered on many fronts. Gerhard Markson's approach on Friday set satisfying new standards on most of them.

Markson, who, for the first time in the orchestra's history, is undertaking a complete Mahler cycle in a single season, is proving a measured, classically-oriented, cool-headed Mahlerian.

He places a high value on technical security, and the solidity of response he achieved from his players was well beyond anything I've previously heard from this orchestra in this piece.

Mahler was among the most meticulous of composers in the instructions he gave conductors in his scores. With Markson's fondness for dotting his 'i's and crossing his 't's, the result on Friday was that the sheer lusciousness of Mahler's orchestration was captured to gorgeous effect.

The conductor's steady hand kept the vast opening movement on track, and provided a poignant stillness for the cautionary nocturnal invocations of the imposingly dark-hued mezzo soprano Patricia Bardon in the fourth. The angelic evocations of the two choirs in the fifth movement were, however, rather too understated.

Understatement, the great risk of Markson's approach, was felt at other points, too, through moments of emotional tempering where the music seemed to be demanding a release that was not forthcoming. That need, of course, of balancing emotional impetuosity and musical good sense, encapsulates one of the great challenges of performing Mahler's music. So far, in this cycle, Markson is containing the one to the advantage of the other.  Michael Dervan

Muse at The Point

There is something so ridiculously overblown about Muse that you can choose to do one of two things - embrace the Force and buckle under the weight of their prog rock, or sit back and sneer from the safety of block C, row A, seat number 26.

One of the brilliant things about the UK trio is that they don't care what you think: singer/guitarist Matt Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dom Howard (enhanced on this tour by an anonymous fourth musician) remain steadfast in their mission to create music that is equal parts thrilling, daunting, absurd and bombastic. Ideas come thick and fast to Muse, and it's clear the main problem lies not in the ideas themselves (the things the band do with their stage set involve the most innovative concepts currently doing the rounds in a rock show of this size - think prog-rock opera as envisioned on an Imax screen, a lighter shade of Pink Floyd, perhaps) but in trying to contain them.

Tracks from the band's studio albums (including Showbiz, Origin of Symmetry, Absolution and latest magnum opus Black Holes and Revelations) are played in front of a backdrop of startling visual imagery. Hi-tech, hi-spec and pulsating with the thrum of expectation, the show itself deserves some kind of technical award for its eye-socket-blitzing splendour. The visuals, of course, are there to match the music, which is so much in thrall to 1970s progressive/fusion rock - everyone from Genesis, Pink Floyd, Greenslade and Mahavishnu Orchestra to Camel, Yes, Hawkwind, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and King Crimson - that for a moment you expect Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson to enter stage left brandishing a rather large flute. It doesn't happen. Instead you've got Muse figurehead Matt Bellamy playing improbably elaborate electric guitar solos and quasi-Dream of Olwyn arpeggios on a white piano.

It sounds as if it's too much to take in: the visual and musical excesses, however, are counterpointed by the personal modesty of the musicians, who seem to accept their positions as ciphers of the spirit of portentous, pretentious and profound prog rock with equal measures of nobility and dignity. And did we mention the bloody big balloons? With red confetti in them? They were fun, too. Tony Clayton-Lea

Opera Gala at the NCH, Dublin

When Mario Malagnini last sang here in 1996, I noticed a slight tonal constriction in softer passages. At the NCH on Saturday, the Italian tenor offered no soft singing, but the tightness was still there.

There was also a slightly nasal tang, but neither defect lessened the impact of a glowing performance of Werther's passionate third act aria or a triumphantly climaxed Nessun Dorma.

That was the best of him: elsewhere he mauled Gastaldon's lovely Musica proibita, a song I thought was tenor-proof, and turned the mighty oath duet from Verdi's Otello into a rhythmically-rough shouting match between the Moor and Iago. Sadly, this blustering destruction of a great dramatic episode was abetted by conductor Colman Pearce, an otherwise exemplary accompanist.

That duet was the only blip in a splendid display of focused singing by Marzio Giossi. The dapper baritone, a regular visitor, again delighted with his virile delivery over a wide vocal range that includes a bright upper extension. He was as impressive in suave accounts of two Neapolitan ditties as he was in his operatic contributions. Here, he was ardent in the King's double aria from La Favorita, flexibly virtuosic in Figaro's ebullient entrance aria and wonderfully expressive in his contribution to the Violetta/Germont scene from La Traviata. Alongside Giossi, Lydia Caruana was something of a lightweight. The Maltese soprano's biography shows her as a singer of Gluck, Mozart, Haydn and suchlike. Here, she opted for a repertoire that didn't suit her skills. For example, the sweet and forward-placed voice that would have worked in Adele's laughing song from Die Fledermaus was swamped by the orchestra in Rosalinde's Czárdas. Her Italian songs were unidiomatic in style and she was out of her vocal depth in the spinto music of Verdi's Violetta and Trovatore Leonora. John Allen