Reviews

Jane Coyle reviews Girls and Dolls at the Drama and Film Centre in Queen's, Belfast, while Michael Dervan reviews McCawley, UO/Ollila at the NCH in Dublin and Andrew Johnstone reviews O'Sullivan, Malone at the Airfield Trust in Dublin

Girls and Dolls
Drama and Film Centre, Queen's, Belfast

Clare and Emma. Emma and Clare. When they were 10, they were simply inseparable best friends. Twenty-odd years later, their lives are inextricably bound in an unholy and unwholesome alliance, born out of a terrible event on a summer day that has branded them with semi-mythical status ever since. In the ways that chalk and cheese so often attract, the two could not be more different. Clare is the undisputed leader, hard-talking, whey-faced, her immaculately turned-out appearance carefully contrived by her mother as a thin veneer of normality. Emma's parents are as rough and ready as they come, but their little girl is an anxious-to-please child, happy to tag along behind her daring friend - even following her into situations which she knows instinctively to be dreadfully wrong.

There is, these days, so much greater public awareness of tragedies like theirs, that the difficulty with Lisa McGee's beautifully written and sensitively observed drama is that one senses its dilemma and endgame very early on. Michael Duke's gently directed production, placed sweetly in the bleached wood island of Terry Loane's set, moves effortlessly between past and present, fluidly changing mood and pace and never becoming bogged down in what is, essentially, a back-tracking conversation between two estranged, damaged women. Physically and vocally, Veronica Leer and Sarah Lyle are a most effective pairing as the older and younger Emma, the anxious child still visible beneath the skin of the wary, watchful woman. Ms. Leer is also terrific in the cameo roles of Emma's parents and the curmudgeonly old man whom she befriends. There is never a doubt that life will be anything but traumatic for Bernadette Brown's tough but terrified Clare, who grows into the dangerously manipulative woman, played with softly-spoken menace by Mary Jordan. There is much to reflect upon and admire in this smooth-as-silk Tinderbox production, but within the unravelling storyline too much is glimpsed too soon and its carefully crafted tension and suspense are diluted accordingly.

Runs until this evening, then tours to Dundalk, Derry, Castleblayney, Coleraine, Portadown, Monaghan, Lisburn, Larne and the Old Museum, Belfast.

Jane Coyle

McCawley, UO/Ollila
NCH, Dublin

Einojuhani Rautavaara - Cantus arcticus
Grieg - Piano Concerto
Sibelius - Symphony No 5

The Ulster Orchestra opened a spread-out, three-concert Dublin season at the National Concert Hall on Thursday with a programme that concentrated on works from Northern Europe.

The music of the 78-year-old Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara has acquired something of a cult following, and high among the list of his most popular works is the Cantus arcticus of 1972.

This is, literally, a "concerto for birds and orchestra", with the orchestra clearly taking a secondary role to the tape recordings of the arctic birds. And that is exactly where the charm and success of the piece lies. Rautavaara treats the orchestra as a kind of cushioned platform through which he focuses attention on some of the most ravishing natural sounds known to man.

British pianist Leon McCawley offered a clean and cool account of the Grieg Piano Concerto. He shunned sentimentality and sculpted the music with consistent intelligence. There was, however, a lack of light and shade in his playing, and sometimes a want of tenderness, too, though the imaginative touches of conductor Tuomas Ollila's handling of the orchestra did offer an amount of welcome compensation.

Sibelius's symphonies have rather fallen out of favour with programme planners in Dublin - the last golden age here for the music of the Finnish master was in the mid 1980s, during the term of Bryden Thomson as principal conductor of what was then the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra.

From a 21st-century perspective Sibelius would be easy to view as a kind of proto-minimalist, and Ollila's downplaying of the Fifth Symphony's harmonic churning and his focus on its surface pattern-weaving certainly seemed like a seriously minimalism-aware response.

In spite of some surprising lapses by the orchestra's brass players, he managed to bring a persuasive biting edge to the melodic writing, and drove the slow-burning climaxes with a sure sense of timing.

Next concert in series on January 11th. Contact 01-4170000.

Michael Dervan

O'Sullivan, Malone
Airfield Trust, Dublin

Given that Cork-born soprano Cara O'Sullivan has built an international reputation on the operatic repertory, it was natural that the high points of her song recital with pianist Eleanor Malone were items that smacked more of the theatre than the salon.

Nor did O'Sullivan make any concessions to the confines of the 50-seat concert room of Airfield House. "I fear for your eardrums," she quipped, "do sit well back." Yet not all was loudness and vibrato-laden intensity. There was wide-eyed whispering in the wild recitatives of Purcell's The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation, playful agility in Schubert's Die Forelle and Der Musensohn, and (navigation problems notwithstanding) creamy resonance in Rodrigo's Cuatro madrigales amatorios.

Yet O'Sullivan had difficulty capturing the easy mezzo voce called for in Schubert's Du bist die Ruh and An die Musik, and in many of the seven songs of Poulenc's cycle La court paille. Of four songs by Roger Quilter (Weep You No More, Fair House of Joy, Dear Valley and Love's Philosophy), the last was simultaneously the loudest and the most successful.

Best of all were two pairs of songs from Donizetti (Il barcaiolo and La zingara) and Verdi (Stornello and Lo spazzacamino). Here was final proof, if more proof were needed, that Cara O'Sullivan's real forte is her fortissimo.

At UCC Aula Maxima (November 16th) and Bantry House ( February 10th).

Andrew Johnstone