Reviews

Irish Times writers review the Anna Livia Opera Fringe Festival, Heloise Geoghegan and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra and Finghin Collins at London Winds

Anna Livia Opera Fringe Festival at the John Field Room and Bank of Ireland Arts Centre

The week-long Anna Livia Opera Fringe Festival organised and overseen by Bernadette Greevy climaxed at the John Field Room on Saturday morning with a gripping presentation of Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea. Williams's verbatim setting of Synge's text may be short in length, but it is an epic music drama of immense emotional impact.

Working in a minimal acting space, John McKeown's effective motivation of the young singers, and his adroit staging, fully exploited the work's tension and tragedy.

The action is dominated by the character of Maurya, the mother who has already last five sons to the sea. Edel O'Brien brought a powerful vocal presence to the role, convincingly colouring her ample mezzo-soprano to convey the character's range of emotions from harrowing grief to dignified resignation.

The two daughters were well sung and acted by sopranos Maire Flavin and Sharon Carthy.

Flavin, as the elder daughter Cathleen, etched a particularly convincing portrait of the stronger sibling. The offstage female chorus, reduced here to just two singers, was ably represented by Andrea Porter and Dara MacMahon.

Baritone Jamie Rock, who made a brief and telling appearance as the last of Maurya's doomed sons, had earlier in the week taken centre stage as one of the two main protagonists in Donizetti's comic opera Il campanello di notte (The Night Bell), in which his role as the waggish Enrico enabled him to exploit his comic talents.

This classic opera buffa plot tells how an elderly apothecary is prevented from consummating his marriage to a younger woman by her piqued former suitor.

Disguised, in turn, as a dyspeptic French dandy, a neurotic opera singer and a doddery old man, the suitor's constant ringing of the apothecary's night bell keeps the older man out of the marital bed.

Rock's soft-grained baritone complemented Eoin Supple's crustier tones as the thwarted bridegroom, and both singers excelled in their patter duets.

In the two female roles, soprano Cliona Cassidy was a bright-toned and agile Serafina, and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Pink a forceful mother-in-law from hell.

John McKeown's pacing of the comic action was compromised here by the need to slow down the many recitative passages that, in the original Italian, would have been spat out with spitfire precision. The standard of musicality in both operas was high, and the ensemble work was spot on, for which credit must go to the musical preparation of Bernadette Greevy and Deborah Kelleher, with the latter an ever- present paragon of support at the piano throughout the week.

On Thursday, at the Bank of Ireland, she partnered Wexford tenor Eamonn Mulhall in a young person's slant on Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe.

Hearing this much-performed piece in the composer's original high keys emphasises just how young the poet-narrator is.

Starting out tonally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Mulhall maintained his light tenor lustre throughout.

There was no shortage of pathos, but a darkening of texture would have heightened the moments of despair.

As it was, this was a young man whose reaction to sexual rejection involved more sadness than anger.

The remainder of Mulhall's programme was a mixed bag of opera and song. Heroes from works by Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Massenet and Weill were attractively vocalised, but diffidently presented with no attempt at diverse characterisation.

The best of the offerings was the dream song from Manon, in which the beauty of the floated high notes made one wish that the tenor had included more French material in the recital. John Allen

Geoghegan, RTÉ NSO/Maloney at the NCH, Dublin

Mendelssohn - Hebrides Overture.

Bruch - Violin Concerto No 1.

Beethoven - Symphony No 2.

Gavin Maloney, assistant conductor of the RTÉ NSO, is as technically accomplished as any young Irish conductor I've heard in over three decades of busy concert-going.

He knows what he wants and how to get it.

Perhaps even more important than that, however, is the fact that what he wants is often musically interesting and sometimes individual.

And he's also got the necessary musical vision to keep large-scale works in sharp focus.

He wasn't heard quite at his best in the opening piece of his programme at the NCH on Friday, when the start of Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture was rather lacking in atmosphere, though things improved when the piece got into its stride.

Violinist Heloise Geoghegan followed her graduation from the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in 2000 with studies in Florence and Leipzig.

In Bruch's First Violin Concerto she showed herself to be a player with a commandingly full tone and she took an unusually spacious view of this most popular of works.

Musically, the effect of her playing was at times deliberate, even studious, as if she were concerned to create time to get things right, rather than to allow herself any freedom of expression.

She certainly showed lots of potential, and Maloney was a supportive partner, firing the orchestra up impressively in some of the tuttis, but never compromising the soloist when she was at work.

Maloney's approach to Beethoven's Second Symphony, was upbeat, nicely sprung in rhythm, and with a myriad of minor detailing that was thoroughly refreshing, and steered the orchestra well away from comfort of the middle ground.

There were plenty of moments when the young man's physical technique of conducting reminded one of his mentor, Gerhard Markson.

However, when it came to musical ideas he seemed to be thoroughly his own man. Michael Dervan

Collins, London Winds at the NCH, Dublin

Schumann - Adagio and Allegro Op 70. Beethoven - Piano and Wind Quintet. Mozart - Serenade in B flat K361.

Saturday's National Concert Hall programme from London Winds was a classic instance of a concert of two halves.

Well, not quite. The first half was a warm-up for the second, but it also included its very own warm-up to a warm-up at the start.

Schumann's Adagio and Allegro for horn (Martin Owen) and piano (Finghin Collins) is a difficult piece musically, and it's also technically challenging for the horn. It wouldn't normally be a good idea to place it at the beginning of a concert, and it certainly didn't work out any better than might have been expected on Saturday.

Beethoven's early quintet for piano and wind was a much more agreeably fluent affair, but for all of the fluency of the playing, the musical engagement was on the light side.

All was changed after the interval for Mozart's Gran Partita, the serenade for 13 instruments, which prompted an early critic to remark, "oh, what an effect it made - glorious and grand, excellent and sublime". London Winds gave one of those performances which seemed perfectly centred.

The playing was individually and collectively strong, sure in pacing, and consistently alert to the almost miraculously luxuriant colouring of a work that is unique in its effect. Michael Dervan