Reviews

Reviews today include James Boyd (viola) and the Talich String Quartet at Castletown House, Celbridge, Arthur Lee and Love at The Ambassador, Dublin and Concorde/Jane O'Leary at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

James Boyd (viola), Talich String Quartet

Castletown House, Celbridge

Quartet No 3...........................................................................Ullmann

Quintet in C, K515....................................................................Mozart

Quartet in G, Op 106................................................................Dvorák

The closing concert of the Music in Great Irish Houses Festival was given at Castletown House on Saturday by the Talich String Quartet, with British viola player James Boyd joining his Czech colleagues in a late string quintet by Mozart.

From the start of the evening it was clear that this would be an evening to delight the connoisseur of string ensemble playing. The Talich's manner had a conversational character which almost belied the fact that the quartet was engaged in a performance for the public. This effect was, of course, an illusion, but in a genre that is domestic in its origins, it was a most agreeable one.

There has been a great growth of interest in recent decades in the music of the unfortunate composers who were incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin, which was presented in propaganda as a "paradise ghetto". Of the 140,000 people who went into the camp, only 5 per cent were destined to survive, and Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), who had studied with Schoenberg and had a conducting career in Prague, was not among them.

His Third Quartet opened the evening in what may well have been the first public performance in Ireland of any of his works. This doleful one-movement piece, written in 1943, shows how he grappled with the impression atonal music had made on him and with the lingering temptations of tonal harmony.

Mozart's String Quintet in C, K515, is a work that often lures musicians into over-playing, but Boyd and the Talichs delivered it with an impressive classical restraint.

The closing Dvorák quartet, which is full of the most imaginative figuration, showed a more outgoing and romantic side to the Czech players' character.

Michael Dervan

Arthur Lee and Love

The Ambassador, Dublin

Love were the quintessential West Coast psychedelic combo, mixing hippy-dippy lyrics with hard home truths, and fusing gentle folk with raucous rock on such legendary albums as Da Capo and Forever Changes.

More than 30 years later, a mostly twentysomething crowd was getting impatient after waiting nearly an hour for the lost legends to make their first Irish appearance. The band's leader, Arthur Lee, hasn't done much since the 1960s, and spent half the 1990s in jail on firearms charges, so no-one really knew what to expect. Would this be a cheap nostalgia trip from a burnt-out old lag, trying to cobble together some cash out of his tattered career? Or would it be a wondrous return to past glories, a fiery, superbly entertaining celebration of freedom, and a timely realignment of Love's legacy? The latter, actually.

From the opening bars of Little Red Book, it was apparent that Lee was fit and able, and determined to reclaim those stolen years. Backed by a band of young guns - another multi-racial line-up in the great Love tradition - Lee tore through his back pages, reigniting the spark of genius which had infused songs like Orange Skies, Your Mind And We Belong Together and Alone Again Or.

Forever Changes is an acknowledged classic, but it often seems like a relic from a long-buried musical Atlantis. Right here, right now, though, songs such as A House Is Not A Motel, Andmoreagain and Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale make perfect sense despite their somewhat impenetrable lyrics. And Bummer In The Summer was a suitable theme for a rainy Dublin night in June when Ireland have just been knocked out of the World Cup.

Lee's four-piece backing band consisted of just two guitars, bass and drums; the absence of flute, acoustic guitar and organ made for a tougher, more resilient delivery. It worked beautifully on Live And Let Live, Seven And Seven Is and She Comes In Colours. Even a new song, Everybody's Gotta Live, sat comfortably with the classic tunes, helped along by a snatch of John Lennon's Instant Karma.

Welcome back, Arthur - it was well worth the wait.

Kevin Courtney

Concorde/Jane O'Leary

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Damballa.............................................................Osmo Tapio Räihälä

Kuulokulmia................................................................Riikka Talvitie

Lakeus...........................................................................Jarmo Sermilä Pros................................................................................Erkki Jokinen Suvisoitto huilulle ja heinäsirkoille...........................Usko Meriläinen

Quartetto.....................................................................Jukka Koskinen

The director, Jane O'Leary, made clear in her spoken introduction that the selection of six works by living Finnish composers presented at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday was not intended to be representative. In fact, it could be read as just the opposite. With the best-known ambassadors of contemporary Finnish music - Aulis Sallinen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg - conspicuous by their absence, what Concorde offered was more, as it were, a showcase for the underdogs.

It was the oldest composer featured, Usko Meriläinen (born 1930), whose work used electronics. His Suvisoitto huilulle ja heinäsirkoille (Summer Sounds for Flute and Grasshoppers), from 1979, presents a frequently blurred intersection between the flute and the electronically transformed sound world of insects.

Jarmo Sermilä (born 1939) was represented by the first performance outside Finland of his Lakeus (The Plains), a set of atmospheric songs for soprano and cello written in 1986 to texts by Vüainö Kirstinä. Pros (1990) by Erkki Jokinen (born 1941) is a duo for clarinet and cello, the two instruments engaging in a sort of collaborative chasing game with lots of microtones.

Damballa (the title is the name of a Haitian voodoo serpent god) by Osmo Tapio Räihälä (born 1964) presents a chattering trio of violin, flute and clarinet, broken into by an oboe, initially offstage, sounding off in grating multiphonics.

Kuulokulmia (Perspectives) by Riikka Talvitie (born 1970) is a rhapsodic outpouring for solo oboe, which graduates from widely spaced intervals into narrower, sliding grooves.

The determinedly polyphonic Quartetto for flute, clarinet, violin and cello by Jukka Koskinen (born 1965) is an early work (1983), apparently untypical of the composer's later style. It seemed to suffer in this performance from an approach gauged for a too generalised expressiveness.

Michael Dervan