Irish Times writers review A Streetcar Named Desire at the Gaiety, the Barber of Seville at Cork Opera House, the National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall, The Flaming Lips at Vicar Street, New Dublin Voices at St Ann's Church, Dublin and the RDS Chamber Music Weekend.
Opera Ireland: Previn - A Streetcar Named Desire at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
André Previn's opera, A Streetcar Named Desire, with a libretto by Philip Littell after Tennessee Williams's play, was first staged by San Francisco Opera in 1998. Previn, who since the late 1960s has been best known as a conductor, is also an accomplished, genre-crossing composer and pianist - he has worked in film and musicals as well as producing concert works, and he plays jazz piano as well as chamber music and concertos.
Streetcar was his first foray into opera, and his many-faceted background is reflected in its mixture of musical styles. There are sleazy saxophone riffs, evocations of jazz bands and popular song, and grating moments grafted in from the world of the 20th-century avant-garde.
Leonard Bernstein's music blends many of the same elements. But Bernstein, it would have to be said, showed not only a greater individuality, but also a sharper ear, a surer melodic sense, and a way with rhythmic drive which places him in a different league to Previn.
Much fuss has been made about the operatic nature of Streetcar as a play. This, however, would by no means have been an advantage when turning the play into an actual opera.
In the case of the central character, Blanche DuBois, a woman keeping up appearances while attempting to escape the failings of her past, Previn overloads the role. It's as if he hopes that in placing her so firmly centre stage, in giving her so much to sing, the words will communicate anything that the music may miss out on. And the music misses out on a lot in the areas of vulnerability, ambiguity, self-deception.
In Opera Ireland's new production, directed by Lynne Parker with atmospheric designs by Monica Frawley, Orla Boylan's firmness and confidence seem too normal, too secure, too commanding for the role.
Unusually, it's her very lack of uncertainty which seems to undermine the character, although the transformation after her breakdown is finely brought off.
Sam McElroy is suitably burly as Stanley Kowalski, her brother-in-law and nemesis, the one obstacle over which her practised wiles seem to hold no sway.
Colette Delahunt captures a kind of quiet lyricism which gives her a humanising depth as Blanche's sister, Stella, continually caught in the cross-fire. In the smaller roles, Paul McNamara plays dumb and passionate as Mitch, the mama's boy who falls into Blanche's sights, and Edel O'Brien is nicely ominous as the flower seller talking of death.
David Brophy's conducting is efficient but seems at times a little stiff, even to the point of erring on the side of chilliness when a cushioning warmth would seem to be more appropriate.
Also tonight, Thurs and Sat. Michael Dervan
Barber of Seville at the Cork Opera House
The Arts Council is still dragging its feet about the recommendations of its own Opera Working Group, which concluded its work last year. So, although the council's policy director, Séamus Crimmins, could point out in its wake that "prioritising opera in 2006 would be desirable," the major intervention is not to be expected until 2008.
On the plus side is the fact that the council, after turning down a funding request for 2005, has this year given revenue funding to Cork's new opera company, Opera 2005, which was set up to capitalise on Cork's year in the sun as European Capital of Culture.
An opera company for Cork may seem like an extravagant idea. But Reykjavik, capital of a country with a total population of 288,000 (as against the 448,000 of Co Cork), supports an opera company which mounts twice the number of performances of Opera Ireland, and has Stravinsky's Rake's Progress and Thomas Adès's Powder Her Face in its current season.
Opera 2005 sticks to more mainstream fare, and its latest offering of Rossini's Barber of Seville, using Robert David MacDonald's English translation, opened at the Cork Opera House.
The new production brings Rossini into the world of silent-movie slapstick. Conor Murphy's setting looking like the back of a studio lot, and opportunity is found to reference a megaphone, a wind-up gramophone, pie-throwing, and the Keystone Kops. Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess's sight gags stream along on the basis that if you don't like any particular one, you won't have to wait long to sample another.
The manic capering may freeze into a tableau vivant from time to time, but most of it is hyper-active, adding to the strangely ineffective frenetic feel that almost inevitably comes from Italian patter translated into English.
The biggest burden of cavorting falls on the rotund Bartolo of Martin Higgins, whose energy level remains unflaggingly high, with Marion Newman slender and sly as the object of his affection, Rosina.
Nicholas Ransley's rather aloof and thin-toned Count goes effectively through his disguises, and although the busyness of the production prevents Nyle Wolfe's Figaro from achieving any real semblance of mastery over the unfolding situation, his vocal command and stylish musical delivery set a standard that the rest of the cast simply do not reach.
Opera 2005's artistic director Kevin Mallon conducts, but doesn't show the same kind of connection with Rossini as he did last year in Mozart's Figaro's Wedding. There are numerous felicitous touches, but he often seems unbending, unwilling to flex with the spirit of the music and the needs of the singers.
It was surprising, too, that he tolerated the musical blot of the overloud, electronic sounding harpsichord continuo of the opening night. Michael Dervan
Dowdall, RTÉ NSO/Gansch at the NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Symphony No. 29 K. 201. John Buckley - In Winter Light. Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5
The forces required for John Buckley's 1995 Maynooth Te Deum - large orchestra, four soloists and three choirs - were so massive that I remember asking Buckley at the premiere whether he was hopeful of future performances down the road. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. The composer's lot. I'm not aware of any performances since.
In Winter Light - his new concerto for flute/alto flute - is economically, usefully scored for percussion, harp and string orchestra. This makes it an easy one to programme, and in my opinion it's a work we ought to hear from time to time.
Its impact is due as much to Buckley's seasoned, understated scoring as to the brilliance of the solo part. In the opening slow movement, subtle flecks of colour emerge from his sparing and delicate use of harp, marimba and glockenspiel. But the overall mood is generated by the crafting of his string chords - paradoxically, in a piece about winter, generating warmth, though perhaps it's the warmth of life rather than of summer, like that of the dark forest in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.
Soloist William Dowdall - the dedicatee - established the speedy pace of the rhythmically energetic second movement with his fluid, vivid scaling of the cadenza. It's in the flute part that the winter cold abides, an imagery inspired by Derek Walcott's poem Omeros.
The music breathed under the direction of visiting conductor Christian Gansch, who established an immediate sense of style and authority with his beautifully-shaped phrasing of Mozart's Symphony No 29 (for which Gansch pared back the string numbers and created a lighter tone).
He concluded with a full-blown, romantic account of Tchaikovsky's heart-on-sleeve Fifth Symphony in which the whole orchestra fired on all cylinders. The trombones and trumpets warranted special mention, however, for the solidarity of their colour and ensemble and the grading of their dynamics. Michael Dungan
The Flaming Lips at Vicar Street, Dublin
We're too busy these days to be dropping acid, so our psychedelic thrills have to remain vicarious. Enter Oklahoma's Flaming Lips. Picture Pink Floyd transmogrified into Teletubbies and set loose in Woodstock, and you get a slight idea of the beautiful silliness that abounds when Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins take the stage.
Before we begin, Wonder Woman hands out laser sticks to the crowd. Then there's an orchestral overture and the Flaming Lips arrive, flanked by fans dressed as aliens and Santa Claus. Twin cannons shoot confetti, giant green balloons float over our heads and some guys dressed as superheroes run around looking for a world to save. Jeez, they haven't even started playing yet and already they've used up their party favours.
Race for the Prize is somewhat lost amid the explosion of colour and light, but when the ticker tape has fallen to earth, we can finally give our full attention to the Flaming Lips' mix of grunge, psychedelia and Sesame Street, encapsulated in Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Free Radicals, She Don't Use Jelly and The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song. Behind the band is a giant LCD screen showing Japanese reality shows, Flaming Lips videos and topless dancers. The viscera of their earlier gigs has been toned down: no footage of medical procedures and no fake blood dripping down Coyne's forehead.
For all their play-acting, there's a deadly serious undercurrent to the Flaming Lips' music: their current album, At War with the Mystics, symbolically vaporises the Bush administration, and Coyne makes no bones onstage about where his loyalties as an American don't lie. There's also an inherent humanity in the band's music, a realisation that our lives are only a blip in the universe and we must seize every nanosecond of happiness while we can. Not sure if their version of Bohemian Rhapsody was a nanosecond well spent, but it still felt great to spend a few short moments in Wayne's joyful, eternally optimistic world. I think it might be time, though, for him to tone down the Disney stuff a bit. Kevin Courtney
NDV, Erdei/Sherlock at St Ann's Church, Dublin
New Dublin Voices, the 25-strong youth choir founded last year by Bernie Sherlock, already has a number of national competition successes to its credit. Here, the young singers essayed a selection of Hungarian music that was brim-full of linguistic and musical challenges.
Hungary's choral tradition richly amalgamates folklore with classical technique. With part-singing and musical literacy enshrined in the school curriculum, Hungarian children are hard-wired with choral discipline from an early age.
That was evident in the confident and utterly natural solo singing of alto Krisztina Takács in four folksong settings by Bartók, lovingly but a little too heavily accompanied by pianist Márta Erdei. Aptly energetic and percussive, Erdei's own solo items included Bartók's Bagpipes and János Vajda's sparse, pointed and étude-like Variations for Piano.
Also from Vajda was an a cappella setting of the Passion text O vos omnes, where sleek melody and a syncopated but chant-like accompaniment combined the moods of religious ceremony and slow tango. Stylistically diverse too, though in a less sophisticated way, was Milkós Kocsár's Missa Tertia (2002) - a succession of brief inspirations whose textures range from routine 19th-century fugue to modernist clusters. Only with its closing Dona nobis pacem, which pays a touching tribute to Kodály's famous setting of the same words, does this meandering piece seems to find its raison d'être.
Ligeti was represented by two pairs of short choral pieces, his settings of two texts by Sándor Weöres, and Two Canons. In these work-in-progress performances, the cohesiveness was more rhythmic than harmonic. Among the most chorally secure items were English renderings of Slovak and Yugoslav folksongs in arrangements by Bartók and Seiber, and two favourite settings by Kodály of the Hungarian texts Esti dal and Túrót eszik a cigány. Andrew Johnstone
RDS Chamber Music Weekend at the RDS, Dublin
This year's RDS Chamber Music Weekend comprised three concerts: the Wiener Mozart-Trio playing works by Mozart and Schumann, the Chilingirian Quartet with pianist Finghin Collins, and the violin- guitar duo of Elizabeth Cooney and Redmond O'Toole.
Now resident in Germany, O'Toole was the recipient of an RDS music bursary three years ago.
He has recently released his first CD, on which Cooney - who was designated rising star of 2006 by the National Concert Hall - puts in a guest appearance.
The two concerts with piano offered differing insights into the problem of balancing that instrument against members of the violin family. The composers are not to be blamed, because up to the mid-19th century the piano had a much more delicate sound than that of today's concert grand, patented by Steinway in 1859.
With the earliest piano trios, then, the cellist's primary function was to reinforce the classical piano's weak bass notes - a function that can be made redundant by the much stronger bass notes of the modern piano.
Irina Auner, the pianist of the Wiener Mozart-Trio, was conspicuously alert to this issue, and kept decisively in the background when the music required it. Her touch was light, and her pedalling economical.
Both her cellist and violinist colleagues were thus clearly audible - and would still have been had they moderated their incisive, edgy timbres with more warmth and shading.
Finghin Collins, in contrast, took the piano part in Dvorák's Quintet in A Op 81 as if he were the soloist in a full orchestral concerto.
Granted, he had four string players to contend with rather than two, and some piano writing of considerable beefiness. Yet his cheerfully sonorous delivery often raised the stakes higher than the Chilingirian Quartet could decently go.
There had, however, been ample opportunity to savour the quartet's exalted musicianship in the two movements of Grieg's unfinished Quartet No 2, and in Shostakovich's Quartet No 10 Op 118.
The Wiener Mozart-Trio took a mostly serious approach to their patron-composer's trios in G K564 and in E K542, and were at their most persuasive in the latter's intriguing first movement.
With Schumann's Trio No 1 in D minor Op 63, emotions were cool, and tempos (particularly in the 2nd and 4th movements) were careful.
Only, it seemed, in two lively encores - Mozart's Rondo alla Turca and Brahms's Hungarian Dance No 2 - did these players finally succumb to the excitement of the music. Andrew Johnstone
