Reviews

National Symphony Orchestra/Colman Pearce; Peter Sweeney (organ)National Concert Hall, Dublin

A Mirror Into The Light . . . .John Buckley

Timbres, Éspace, Mouvement . . . .Henri Dutilleux

Lontano . . . . .György Ligeti

Organ Concerto . . . .John Buckley

John Buckley was the featured composer in the first concert of this year's Horizon series, on Tuesday. In choosing to juxtapose his own music with Dutilleux's Timbres, Éspace, Mouvement and Ligeti's Lontano, Buckley was declaring his love of the elaborate and colourful and of the cosmic idea.

Written in 1978 and revised in 1991, the Dutilleux is inspired by Van Gogh's The Starry Night. It is individual yet utterly French, in a line from Debussy through Messiaen, flecked with Boulez.

Ideas are identified by colour at least as much as by pitch and rhythm, and the extraordinarily rich orchestration is precisely calculated to create a sequence of sonorous images.

Lontano is perhaps unique in conveying, almost simultaneously, impressions of distance, stillness and motion.

Forbidding discipline lies behind its extreme complexity, and like the Dutilleux, it expresses an extra-musical idea - in the composer's words, "a window on long-submerged dream worlds of childhood". In both works, form and idea seem inseparable.

Buckley's six-minute orchestral piece A Mirror Into The Light (1999), and his Organ Concerto (1992), which lasts nearly 30 minutes, show the composer's love of complexity and an awareness of its dangers. Complexity is restrained by straightforward form, but because of that, elaboration and density seem less deeply embedded than in Dutilleux and Ligeti - more a mode of dress than a means. Nevertheless, this music has an appealing swagger and panache, epitomised in the demonic organ-playing of Peter Sweeney.

The National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Colman Pearce were on strong form throughout. One limitation, especially noticeable in Lontano, was in the middle- ground dynamics, which tended to balloon too quickly into loud or soft. But this was a creditable concert, with persuasive performances of four demanding works.

Martin Adams

• Ian Wilson is the featured composer in the next Horizons concert, at 6.30 p.m. on March 12th at the NCH. Admission free.

Bill Janovitz

Whelans, Dublin

Without any introductions, the Amherst, Massachusetts, man launched into I'm Allowed, one of the songs by his band, Buffalo Tom, that most easily lends itself to acoustic reinterpretation. It was a little tentative, but the audience response was warm and generous.

Atlantic, the first track from his second solo album, Up Here, was more like it. It was written to be performed by one man and his guitar, and it sounded fine.

"I hope to lighten the mood at some point tonight," he said, commenting that the last time he played here was a bad night for a lot of people. It was the night Kurt Cobain died.

Next up, not lightening the mood at all, was Frozen Lake, about "a complicated girl". It's beautiful. Long may Janovitz write deep and dark songs.

Crutch, from the best Buffalo Tom album, Let Me Come Over, was magical, particularly if you've ever lived in Boston, which was name-checked throughout. Postcard, from the group's last album, Smitten, sounded like a timeless country classic in this stripped-down form. If Johnny Cash had written it, it would be a standard by now.

Summer made my hair stand on end. If this song doesn't make you long for the lost summers of your youth, you spent your youth too productively.

Like You Do and Light In December, both from Up Here, showed a mellower, happier side to Janovitz. The former was written for his friend's wedding, while the latter is, very touchingly, about his young child.

His version of The Replacements' Here Comes A Regular would surely have had even its writer, Paul Westerberg, applauding. It was spirited, moving and awesome.

If you are a Buffalo Tom fan and didn't go, kick yourself. This was superb.

Pádraig Collins

The Lottery Ticket

New Theatre, Dublin

FOR its duration of about 90 minutes, Spacecraft company's production of The Lottery Ticket maintains a pace and a decibel level that keep its observers under the cosh. There is no scope here for polite detachment; this is one that invites, nay insists on, audience involvement.

The Hee-Haw family is in dire straits. No 1 son, the only breadwinner, has just been sacked and there is no food on the table. Father, mother, No 1, younger son Sonny and daughter Sissy search their collective mind for a solution, and decide to buy a lottery ticket. To finance the purchase, Sissy will sell her sixth baby, having already sussed out the market with its predecessors.

The ticket is bought and duly wins. Sonny, the poet-author of Belfast You Dirty Bitch - I Love You, goes north to give a recitation, and is shot. No 1 son invests in a helicopter and dies in a crash with a statue of Daniel O'Connell.

The money is lost in lawsuits taken by the babies' fathers, and the Hee-Haws expire one by one but return from the dead to cannibalise each other and, obscurely, to recycle the lottery.

It is undiluted farce, extravagant in the sense of being uncontrolled and excessive. Laughs are easily lost in the clamour and breakneck pace, but enough survive for enjoyment. Author Roddy McDevitt plays the ticket (a novel touch) and a few other external characters, and directs the work. The others - Oonagh McLoughlin, Lenny Hayden, Simon Toal, Tom O'Leary and Hilary Cotter - hit a variety of individually manic notes as required.

There is clearly a lot of talent invested in this show, which would pay greater dividends were it leavened with satire and fitted with a more coherent ending. A half-credible social context would also help, but this is a play that relies on comic intent and performance for its plaudits. On those grounds, it scores well.

Gerry Colgan

Runs to February 9th; to book, phone 01-6703361

Sack

Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin

Sometimes an image can say it all. On projector screens above the nodding heads of the Dublin band Sack, video loops panned between steel grilles and walls with narrow gaps before a climactic montage saw doors slowly swinging open. The analogy is obvious but merited. After a decade of determination, spent pawing around on the outside, Sack are ready to come in from the cold.

There was a sensational balance to this wonderful night of guitar pop. A good support act should complement the main attraction without upstaging it. Mark Cullen's new band, Pony Club, delivered superbly doleful and instantly catchy tunes. Sticking to a theme, their dark and dreamy music painted fraught domestic scenes in a pained Flaky Wife and the ironically titled Happy Families.

Storming on with a more upbeat repertoire, Sack blasted off with a punchy Kingsize, in which hard-hitting beats underpinned bright guitar lines. Singer Martin McCann lurched around beneath the bill of his baseball cap, trading T.K. Maxx quips with the crowd and casting out pop favourites such as Inflight deliriously early in the gig.

Hunched over his microphone, McCann's vocals still resembled Beautiful South crooner Paul Heaton crossed with a Morrissey-influenced aloofness. On new song Gloryhunter, guitarist John Brereton offset McCann's voice with a shrill keyboard melody before the band joined them to create a rich texture. Meanwhile, a soaring Tag allowed Brereton and fellow-guitarist Dave Dorgan to contrast gentle twang with abrasive grind before building to a stirring finish.

Pop tunes came hard and fast, with breakthrough album Adventura Majestica thoroughly represented. Punctuated by McCann's easy-going banter, the bullet-paced set featured some older material, with Butterfly Effect's Sunny receiving a cursory nod and What Have The Christians Ever Done For Us? igniting the encore.

Delicate and sonorous, Sack were a treat.

Peter Crawley