Branding and brand loyalty are not issues one normally associates in music with composers. Those sorts of loyalties seem to fit more readily with the world of recordings or orchestras. But there are branding issues for composers, too. You might not agree with Hans Keller that "on the whole, Mozart's early quartets are quite abominable", or that "many of Boccherini's masterpieces are, of course, immeasurably superior".
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-99), a near contemporary of Haydn, is a case in point. I can't recall hearing a note of his music in concert in Dublin before last Sunday, when Nicholas McGegan, music director-designate of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, programmed the fourth of his symphonies, after Ovid's Metamorphoses.
This symphony, subtitled The Rescuing Of Andromeda By Perseus, is more evocative than illustrative, and is in a style at times reminiscent of Gluck, Dittersdorf's teacher. From the melting string tone of the opening through a chastely soaring oboe solo to the minuet that closes the finale, McGegan and his players found apt gestural responses to make this music sound its best. It may disappoint listeners looking for the focus or structure of a Mozart or Haydn, but it's beautifully crafted and more than engaging enough on its own terms.
The ICO's current artistic director, Fionnuala Hunt, was the soloist in the 19-year-old Mozart's Violin Concerto In D, K211, in which her assertive style led to some wirily aggressive tone and patches of hasty rhythm that contrasted with the elegantly turned orchestral playing cultivated by McGegan without any sacrifice of expressive intensity.
The orchestra's playing was a bit rougher, edgy without being sharp, in Stravinsky's 1946 Concerto In D, but the delicacy of the harmonic colouring was at all times well caught.
The programme left the finest wine until last. Mozart's Symphony In A, K201, written the year before the violin concerto, is a youthful masterpiece, justifiably the most played of the composer's teenage symphonies. McGegan's approach, which so amiably balanced brio and delicacy, made for an invigorating experience.
- Michael Dervan
Most tribute acts play music for people who want to wallow in the memory of a band's halcyon days, but there are a few that capture the essence of an artist so expertly, so intuitively, that if you close your eyes you can imagine the real act being on stage, not their doppelgängers. Then there are tributes such as this.
Leslie Curtis's take on the trend is possibly the most frustrating this reviewer has witnessed. For starters, Eva Cassidy, who died in the mid-1990s, was a singer of other people's songs, posthumously catapulted to fame a couple of years ago through radio play of her version of Over The Rainbow.
She had a fine voice, but there was little else to differentiate her from hundreds of other fine-voiced singers in America - she was from the state of Washington - and beyond. It's debatable, too, whether she would have received airplay outside her locality had she lived, for her ambitions amounted to those of a backing singer - admirable, but hardly the making of an icon.
Yet Curtis, a bubbly, crystal-clear Home Counties type dressed in black, her face framed, like Cassidy's, with blond hair, tells Cassidy's tragic story and sings Cassidy's album tracks (Fleetwood Mac's Songbird, Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time, The Box Tops' The Letter - covers of covers all) as if Cassidy were the missing link between Isadora Duncan, Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell.
Curtis is cosily professional, but it's nigh on impossible to be convinced - which is surely what all tribute acts should aim for.
- Tony Clayton Lea
Having doggedly brought quality blues, folk and roots to Belfast every Thursday for the past five years, Jim Heaney's Real Music Club could not have imagined a better line-up - nor turn-out - for its anniversary festival.
Saturday night saw Peter Mulvey from Milwaukee and Chris Smither from New Orleans performing at the top of their games, with a wonderful, congenial vibe among the audience.
Friday night, with Kelly Joe Phelps, was an experience no less extraordinary, yet it was balanced on a perilous line between genius and madness. Phelps's support act, the local legends Ronnie Greer and Kenny McDowell, enthralled the crowd with a pristine set of Chicago blues - an exquisite recreation of a form delivered with class and experience.
Phelps began his Damascene road to solo performance only a few years back, with two albums blending seamless Delta blues with his own pastiches, gradually applying a John Coltrane-like virtuosity unique to that world. More recently, he has delved into the roots of other American forms while charting yet darker themes in his own writing.
In live performance, words and titles - where intelligible - are almost irrelevant, for this is a man capable of creating a near transcendental mood. Unlike his forebears, Phelps's words affect no knowledge of any hellhound on his trail, but you have an uneasy feeling that he is seeking a netherworld where such a fiend exists. If he finds and confronts it, we can only hope his genius is not consumed, for this is a man whose gifts are precious and rare.
- Colin Harper
