Irish Times critics review Dunne and Hernandez at Whelan's, Tosca at The Helix, and the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet at the National Gallery.
ICO/Marwood, National Concert Hall, Dublin
Barber - String Quartet. Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto in D minor. Beethoven - String Quartet in C sharp minor Op 131
Arrangements are in vogue again. And they're making their presence felt with a vengeance in the Irish Chamber Orchestra's current season, where nearly half the pieces featured are not being heard as their composers originally conceived them.
The orchestra's new artistic director, violinist Anthony Marwood, offered up-sizing of two string quartets in his debut programme in his new role. And he can argue important precedents in both cases.
It was Samuel Barber himself, at Toscanini's behest, who created his best-known piece, the Adagio for strings, from the slow movement of his sole string quartet. Also in the 1930s, Dimitri Mitropoulos conducted his orchestral version of Beethoven's String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op 131, in Boston, and four decades later a young member of that audience, Leonard Bernstein, went on to adapt Mitropoulos's work and record his own version with the Vienna Philharmonic.
At the National Concert Hall it was the Barber, which Marwood conducted, which worked best, the outer movements gaining in weight and gravitas, the familiar Adagio presented less lushly than usual.
The Beethoven, with Marwood directing from the violin, proved an altogether less tractable challenge. The orchestra's playing was, if anything, more polished and disciplined than in the Barber, but the sense of flexion that the music requires was simply absent most of the time.
Most of the time, too, the extra weight of even a chamber orchestra's string section detracted from the music's expressive potential, giving the performance a kind of strait-jacketed feel.
Marwood was the nimble soloist in the Violin Concerto in D minor that Mendelssohn wrote at 13. There may be a few awkward compositional turns in the piece, and the teenage composer did write a rather longer piece than his ideas merited, but Marwood and his players made a favourable impression, treating the whole as a stylishly- delivered, musico-gymnastic work-out. - Michael Dervan
Dunne and Hernandez, Whelan's, Dublin
Now that's what I call dance music. Anything that inspires punters to tango with abandon is fine by me, and the music of Argentinian guitarist, Ariel Hernandez and Irish accordionist, Dermot Dunne did just that - with immense style.
The rhythms of the southern hemisphere fuelled milongas, tangos and chacareras, each one tumbling after the other with a curious mix of wry nonchalance and highly disciplined precision. Ariel Hernandez is that consummate professional whose superb guitar lines sit beneath a voice that could only have been born beneath a southern star. His warm, welcoming tone and idiosyncratic vocal chinks are a thing apart, a passionate celebration of word and melody, at times in unison, at others in delightful dissonance.
Dermot Dunne's accordion brings both poise and playfulness to the mix, his theatrical facial expressions shadow-boxing with the circuitous patterns of the tune, and in the process, luring the listener into its labyrinth. Para Lennie, one of Hernandez' own chacareras (a 19th-century folk dance from the northwest of Argentina) gloried in its own muscularity, jousting playfully with Dunne's accordion, in what at times resembled a jazz ballet in all its mischievous posturing.
Romanian cellist Adrian Mantu stretched the music tight as a drum, infusing it with a welcome discord that insured it against any tendency toward preciousness, and Peruvian percussionist Frank Vidal engaged in a fine-boned act of approach-avoidance to bolster and sway the rhythms in all the right places.
Dunne and Hernandez' music challenges more than cajoles, daring its listeners to follow it into uncharted terrain. From the syncopations of the milonga, Taquito Militar, to the crowd-pleasing emotion of Pa'l Que Se Va, Ariel Hernandez and Dermot Dunne's repertoire glories in its own diversity.
It was a refreshing celebration of commonality and difference that left us wishing for even the slightest genetic link with the Argentinian tango master, Astor Piazzolla, as the final notes faded. - Siobhán Long
RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet, National Gallery, Dublin
Haydn - Quartet in C Op 54 No 2. Bartók - Quartet No 6. Zemlinsky - Quartet No 1
The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet performed a trio of unusual works for the penultimate concert of their March/April tour in the Shaw Room of the National Gallery.
Even the Haydn was strange, opening with what sounds like a high-speed finale, followed by a slow movement that becomes a minuet, and ending with an Adagio. These adventures outside of convention help make this one of the most original of Haydn's quartets.
The Vanbrugh were at their best at slower speeds. Even if there may have been room for more earthiness in the gypsy-influenced second movement Adagio, there was a rich, sustained quality in the three lower parts as they supported leader Gregory Ellis in his rhapsodic line.
Similarly unusual is the last of Bartók's six quartets, made up of four slow movements, of which three contain sharply contrasting quick sections.
And similar to the Haydn, the Vanbrugh's playing here was most persuasive in the slow sections, conveying something of the grief with which Bartók's heart was heavy as he wrote the piece in 1939. The angry interpolations - a Vivace, a verbunkos march, and a wild burletta - were strong in character but dogged by the same dips in tone quality, blend and precision that had marred the quick sections of the Haydn.
There was a greater consistency in the Vanbrugh's sound in the afternoon's final work, the first of four quartets by Alexander Zemlinsky. The piece qualifies as unusual because it is not often programmed. The teacher (and also brother-in-law) of Arnold Schoenberg, Zemlinsky sounds a million miles from the pioneering of the Second Viennese School in this music which resonates at every step with the voice of Brahms. - Michael Dungan
Oldsquarelines, JJ Smyth's, Dublin
Oldsquarelines, formerly Orpheus, completed a short Irish tour here, playing to a near-capacity audience. The quintet - Seán Óg (alto/soprano/flute), Daniel Jacobson (guitar), Greg Felton (piano), Dave Redmond (bass) and Seán Carpio (drums) - is filled with some of the finest young talent on the Irish jazz scene, and it showed in the constantly challenging and richly varied original repertoire they performed.
Surprisingly, since the band has an impressive new CD almost ready for release, only one piece performed was drawn from the material on that forthcoming album. All the rest were, presumably, new pieces by the band's members, and ensembles, despite a very occasional untidiness, particularly on the tricky faster pieces, were crisply and zestfully delivered.
This dedication to making its own repertoire underlines one of the band's main assets: its compositional strengths. All members of the quintet are composers, and their pieces are highly original, creative, packed with incident and show a determination to avoid any hint of the cliched or the safe.
They reveal a judicious mix of the formal and the free, with plenty of meat for soloists to chew on, and a sense of structure which somehow encourages them to be adventurous while simultaneously providing a framework to contain these ventures outside the envelope. But the group's reliance on rubato playing is marked, and there was a sense, especially as both sets developed, that it was a factor that affected the audience response and diluted the band's impact.
Apart from Felton, who is surely the most gifted young pianist on the scene here, the band's far-from-negligible solo resources don't always match up to the demands and opportunities provided by their compositions. Well as the other two front-liners performed, particularly in ensembles, it was Felton who was the most consistently interesting soloist.
In the first set both he and Redmond were impressive on Redmond's The Grind, for example, while Seán Óg produced one of his finest solos on soprano during an unidentified set closer. And Jacobson, whose compositions are possibly the most distinctively personal in the band's book, showed an acute awareness of texture and contrast as a soloist and ensemble player throughout.
The sinuous line of the second set's opener provoked marvellous responses from Felton and (on alto), Seán Óg, and the same player's At First I Thought It Was The End produced an alto solo that epitomised the band's willingness to go outside the boundaries while keeping one eye on form. Finally, Carpio was, as usual, absolutely stunning and a key element in knitting all the loose ends of the ensemble together. And the concert also offered further evidence of what a marvellous young bassist Redmond has become. - Ray Comiskey
Tosca, The Helix, Dublin
With a torturing, a stabbing, an execution and a suicide, Puccini's Tosca more than just hints at cheap melodrama. So for Opus 1 Music Ltd, the thrifty new British company that has already brought his La Bohème to novel venues with aspiring singers, it was neither a safe nor a particularly imaginative choice.
Designed and directed by Jonathan Clift, the stagecraft is unashamedly traditional and distributes the action deftly. Yet some lurid costumes and tawdry decor give things a musty tone; the heroine's cloaks are several sizes too small and the wine looks like cranberry juice. These and other intimations of parody have a dissipating effect on the tragedy.
Though there's a pronounced chamber-music feel to the pared-down instrumentation, the dozen-strong band were prominently sited in the Helix's Mahony Hall, and could respond too loudly to the big gestures of conductor Fraser Goulding. The playing, however, was generally tidy, the pacing solid, and the singing of the tiny chorus unexpectedly massive.
The performance's greatest strengths lay in its cast. Except for the hero's part of Cavaradossi (sung by an idiomatic but somewhat unpredictable Richard Barrowclough) and the minor part of Spoletta (a yet-to-mature Thomas Lydon), the roles were taken with vocal panache and dramatic fervour. Bringing conspicuous qualities of voice and characterisation to their subsidiary parts were Mark Saberton (as the hapless fugitive Angelotti) and Rhys Jenkins (who doubled as the jailer and as a sacristan beset by janitorial chores).
With a tastefully modulated yet steely-edged voice, Sarah Estill is a well-equipped tragic heroine. As the eponymous impulsive diva, she infused her part with angst and sang it with passion. More commanding still was the splendid Brazilian bass Mario Solimene who, as the villainous Scarpia, oozed malicious arrogance. - Andrew Johnstone
