Reviews

Classical, rock and jazz feature in today's reviews as Dermot Gault sees the The Ulster Orchestra; Kevin Courtney and Peter Crawley review The Soundtrack of Our Lives and The Hives, respectively; and Ray Commiskey find the Scott Colley Quartet and the Steve Turre Quartet add up to less than the sum of their parts.

Ulster Orchestra/Peter Rundel

Ulster Hall, Belfast

Dermot Gault

Four Dance Episodes from RodeoCopland

Cello ConcertoWalton

El DoradoAdams

Walton's Cello Concerto was given its first performance in 1957, critics saw only a languid sybarite who had turned his back on then-current musical preoccupations. Today audiences are grateful for the lushness of Walton's harmony and orchestration.

In the faster episodes of this elusive work Ralph Kirshbaum showed virtuosity, but conductor Peter Rundel was perhaps too ready to sacrifice accuracy for speed.

In the slower music Walton's entrancing webs of sound - enlivened by vibraphone, harp and celesta - made an apt backdrop for Kirshbaum's ripe-toned and expressive playing.

John Adams also specialises in neo-romantic harmony, combined with hypnotic, elaborately-orchestrated ostinati, although one misses Walton's genius for melody in El Dorado, here receiving its Irish première.

Completed in 1991, just before the Columbus anniversary, which inspired statements on colonial oppression from many artists, the composer's programme note describes it as "less a political statement than a personal and very emotional response to the impact of man on the landscape".

The first section, "A Dream of Gold", is a strident accumulation, "a vast crescendo of brutal force . . . Man and his malignant energy have been released like a virus."

The concluding Soledades (Solitudes) is "an Arcadian dream", with stable harmonies and simple melodic material. It might have been even more evocative without the taped effects, but it's still a serious and convincing depiction of nature.

Copland's folksy Rodeo seems naïve in comparison. The performance here was brass-heavy and the lyrical episodes did not bloom as they might have.

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin

Kevin Courtney

This year's Heineken Green Energy Festival is sound-tracked by Swedish band The Hives and this bunch from Gothenberg, who opened the festival last Friday.

Like The Hives, The Soundtrack Of Our Lives (TSOOL) come on like a bit of a novelty act.

They look like they should be in ABBA and sound like they should be in The Who.

Instead of skinny ties, however, portly singer Ebbot Lundberg rocks the medieval serf look, sporting a big, shapeless smock and a wide white neckerchief which, combined with his pageboy-style blonde barnet and goatee, makes him resemble a mad musketeer, brandishing a mic instead of a sword.

Lundberg is the lumbering focal point of TSOOL live, prancing around the stage, jumping down into the crowd, and bouncing his vocals off the guitars of Mattias Bärjed and Ian Person.

The song 21st Century Rip Off snatches the tambourine-tinged tempo from The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, knocks off a beat, and turns it into a joyous anthem of post-millennial letdown.

Tonight, on the other hand, is a genteel ballad with stars in its eyes, and Lundberg wrings just the right measure of melodrama out of it.

Mind The Gap is a smart, foot-sure slice of life philosophy.

Despite their old-fashioned approach, clownish stage antics and blatant prog-rock proclivities, it's hard not to be drawn into TSOOL's oddball orbit, and harder still to avoid spacehopping along with the retro rocket sound.

The Hives/Muse Dublin Castle

Peter Crawley

This was an arranged marriage of convenience. Fagersta's New Wave throwbacks, The Hives, sold out an original Ambassador booking in a blip. Before you could say "bipolar opposites" they'd wedded Devon's baroque'n'roll group at the Heineken Green Energy Festival. On stage it appeared that neither party was still speaking to the other.

Next to The Hives, a peacock would seem racked with self-doubt. Taking to the stage with a strut, their moniker hanging from the rig in lightbulb-dotted retro-narcissism, Sweden's rock saviours were a riot of chest-puffing, chin-jutting confidence. Poutingly dandy in sartorial uniforms of black with white ties, they stomped through the tight rhythms of The Hives Declare Guerre Nuclaire in an atomic burst.

Blessed with a talent for faux self-promotion and straight-faced arrogance, frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, gave a running commentary on exactly how well they were performing. "The Hives are currently conquering Dublin Castle," he cawed. "It is now time to play our seminal hit single."

Making three-minute songs look like grandiose indulgences, they pranced around like an army of clockwork Mick Jaggers, freezing once during the infectious Main Offender, as though someone forgot to wind them.

Before propelling punk anthem Hate to Say I Told You So, Pelle mentions that another band will play later, but the Hives are going home. The implication was that we should do the same.

All of which left the humourless Muse in a tight spot, not alleviated by prolonged technical difficulties early in their set.

When New Born finally relieved their obvious discomfort (Mathew Bellamy hitherto hidden behind his piano, noodling around on his guitar) the emancipation was euphoric. At their calamitous best, Muse drenched the crowd with glorious histrionics, Bellamy's guitar hulking out Plug In Baby ferociously.

At their angsty, classical-influenced worst, it sounded like a precocious tantrum.

Scott Colley Quartet

Wicklow Arts Centre

Ray Comiskey

The third Bray Jazz Festival opened on Friday in a style which marked the progress it has made since its inception - with a debut concert in an elegant, brand new auditorium, given by a group led by one of America's most respected bassists, Scott Colley. And if, given the level of talent on display, his quartet's performance seemed a bit below par, that's probably one of the hazards inherent in an improvised idiom played by a band on an energy-sapping tour.

For a group which, on the evidence of the organised way it handled its repertoire - all original material - had clearly been playing together for a while, there was a surprising degree of looseness at times. Individually, the quartet had a superb drummer and bassist in Bill Stewart and Colley, and an impressively fluent young guitarist, Adam Rogers - although the technically adept Ravi Coltrane, on tenor and soprano, tended to meander as a soloist and failed to impose a sense of personality on what he did.

There were moments of excellence; focused, plangently beautiful bass solos on Alpha, Out Of The Void, and a modal piece towards the end, as well as a striking Rogers outing on The Saucer, notable for the guitarist's ability to ease gradually into his solos, keeping his formidable technique in check and allowing his ideas to breathe before he begins to thicken the textures.

But the quartet's strongest elements remained. Stewart, an extraordinary drummer, was able to support and push in equal measure, without being intrusive, and the leaders' maturity of conception made him the band's outstanding soloist.

However, the absence of any sustained collective creative tension diluted their impact; the whole was somehow less than the sum of its accomplished parts.

Steve Turre Quartet

Vicar Street, Dublin

Ray Comiskey

ESB Jazz series continued on Sunday with a less than convincing concert by trombonist Steve Turre's quartet. Although most of the group have worked together often, it lacked the close knit feeling such experience normally engenders - all the more surprising, given the talent on display. The leader is a true virtuoso, with a clean articulation, unfazed by any tempo, with astonishing range and stamina, and a beautifully full and centred sound on ballads; there seems nothing beyond his capabilities on the instrument. He was backed by a celebrated bassist, Buster Williams, a gem, in the New York pianist, Ronnie Mathews, and a young drummer, Dion Parson, still finding his place in the group's scheme of things.

A cliché-drenched blues, Ray's Collard Greens, opened the concert unpromisingly, with Turre introducing his conch-shell blowing, to which the only answer, to borrow from Dr Johnson, is that it is done well, but then one is surprised to find it done at all.

Long solos on this and a ballad, Misty, didn't help, and things seemed to be sliding downhill until Mathews suddenly lit the fire with a superb effort on the late Jay Jay Johnson's Say When. It had a galvanising effect on the band, which infused the calypso-like Fungi Mama and E.D. with the feeling that it was finally getting down to business. It didn't last. As they began to peak they reached the break and never recaptured that excitement in the second set. Mathews continued to be an adornment, with lovely work on Back In The Day, but even he couldn't compete with the lengthy trombone and bass - with questionable intonation at times - outings on The Nearness Of You.

By then the concert was drifting into routine and never seemed likely to rise above it.