Reviews

Reviewed today are Grainne Mhaol at the Festival Big Top, Galway, Shaun Tirrell (piano), National Symphony Orchestra/Peter Shannon, at the National Concert Hall and Maxim Vengerov (violin), Finghin Collins (piano), NYO/Alexander Anissimov at the University Concert Hall, Limerick

Grainne Mhaol

Festival Big Top, Galway

The pageant died of embarrassment sometime in the late 1960s. With the weird exception of the annual mock re-enactment of the Battle of the Boyne at Scarva, the last really big historical pageant in Ireland was the one staged in 1966 in Croke Park for the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Even then, in the television age, it probably seemed naff. Pageants, with their cheerful amateurism and naive view of history, have little place in more cynical and sophisticated times.

And yet, something was lost when the form was abandoned. Pageants were community theatre before the term was invented. Shakespeare may have patronised the rude mechanicals who perform heroic drama for their social betters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but Bottom and Peter Quince are still a lot of fun.

Grainne Mhaol, currently playing in the vast Big Top beside Galway Cathedral as part of the Galway Arts Festival, is nothing less than Macnas's attempt to re-invent the pageant. Macnas is best known, of course, for its outdoor parades and its indoor mythological spectacles. Grainne Mhaol builds on this work, but it also marks a new direction for the company.

The new style is a synthesis of the old achievements. From the parades, there is the mix of professional performers with community volunteers, the clatter of massed drums, the stilt-walkers, the flag-wavers. From the indoor shows, there is the use of a dramatic narrative which connects to the Gaelic past. If you put these two strands together what you get is a pageant. The attempt to revive the form depends crucially on the elegance with which the two different strands are woven together into a coherent whole.

For the most part, Kathi Leahy's production is a roaring success. It has the impulsive directness of the old community pageants and the fresh stream-like quality of a good parade. It also has the beauty and visual complexity of a work of contemporary physical theatre, drawing judiciously on influences as diverse as Els Comedients, Footsbarn, Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage.

The key to this sure-footed balancing of the different forms is the use of the magnificent Big Top.

In its scale and architecture, the Big Top puts the adjacent cathedral in the shade. Yet it also has that wonderfully temporary, nomadic quality that you get in a circus tent. You can still feel the grass beneath your feet and hear the rush of the river outside. You are, in a sense, both indoors and outdoors. It is the perfect arena for a production which combines the company's history on the streets and in conventional theatres.

The Grainne Mhaol story is also well chosen, for it is part history and part myth. Grace O'Malley was a real person, but it is not as just another tribal chieftain during the twilight of the Gaelic order that she has attracted contemporary artists such as Garry Hynes and Shaun Davey. She is the Irish counterpoint to the English myth of Elizabeth I, our sea goddess against theirs. Elizabeth is the imperious Virgin Queen, so Grainne Mhaol is the fecund Pirate Queen. And yet, as defiant women rulers, they also belong together.

Thus, Grainne Mhaol runs into trouble whenever Patricia Forde's generally adept script tries to be a historical drama and works wonderfully when it remembers that it is a mythological pageant.

Fortunately, the mythic note is dominant. The aesthetics of the procession are not those of drama.

Processions work on a simple narrative: this happens, then there's this, and this comes next. If they stop and try to explain themselves, the crowd gets restless.

Grainne Mhaol wanders from time to time but usually comes back to this basic rule. Along the way there are stunning set-pieces - the construction of Grace's first ship, a brilliant evocation of trade with Spain - that revel in the sheer joy of having 70 performers to play with. And it all builds towards a delightful visual coup in the eventual confrontation of two goddesses, Elizabeth and Grace.

This is, then, both a formidable achievement in itself and a bold revival of a dead form that opens the way for Macnas's future. If only the Orange Order would commission Macnas to re-invent the 12th of July . . .

Fintan O'Toole

[ www.galwayartsfestival.ie ]

Maxim Vengerov (violin), Finghin Collins (piano), NYO/Alexander Anissimov

University Concert Hall, Limerick

Romeo and Juliet ........................................................ Tchaikovsky

Piano Concerto No 3 .................................................. ... Beethoven

Symphonie espagnole ............................................................... Lalo

Symphonie espagnole is the one work through which the French composer Edouard Lalo (1823-1892) is widely remembered today. It was written in 1874 for the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, and its attractiveness lies in its tuneful charm, with a solo part that ranges from sultriness to effervescence.

It's a piece which seems to stimulate a certain wariness in performers, who sometimes even cut out one of its five movements, a practice which was in place by the time of its US première in 1887 and can still be encountered on disc.

Today the piece is more than ever an orphan, not only because most listeners know nothing else by Lalo to relate it to, but also because it's become somewhat isolated by changes in performing style - the demonstrative virtuosity of our age is not apt to bring out the best in the piece.

The Symphonie espagnole requires a player who commands a certain nonchalance, who can conjure the illusion of a perfection that seems to have been achieved by means that are incontrovertibly casual. The expressive value of showmanship and the stirring gutsiness of urgent tone in the higher reaches of the G string can destabilise the music's grace, and undermine the Spanish rhythms which are a core element in the music's unique appeal.

The Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov, one of the leading virtuosos of our day, made an unexpected appearance to play the Lalo with the National Youth Orchestra at the University Concert Hall in Limerick on Tuesday, in what was described as a "sneak preview" of his performance at the opening night of the BBC Henry Wood Proms in London tonight.

Vengerov's approach was up-front and modern, the shining, lustrous tone spotlit to maximum effect, careering flourishes played for brilliance, the rhythm often contoured to maximise the volume of sound achievable, the music clearly the servant of the performer. As in virtually any high-class showpiece performance, the player basked in the glory of a technical and expressive armoury displayed to perfection.

The NYO under Alexander Anissimov offered sterling support, with a palpably high sense of involvement and commitment occasioned by the presence of such a distinguished guest. Sadly, they had been slack and lacklustre in the first half, in an incomprehensibly anaemic account of Tchaikovsky's fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet, and only slightly more focused in partnering Finghin Collins, whose account of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto had both nobility and poise.

Michael Dervan

Shaun Tirrell (piano), National Symphony Orchestra/Peter Shannon

National Concert Hall

Russlan and Ludmilla: Overture...........................................Glinka

Polovtsian Dances.................................................................Borodín

Totentanz....................................................................................Liszt

Sinfonia India.........................................................................Cháves

Listz's  Totentanz or Dance of Death must have been intended to terrify, like the woodcuts in the medieval chapbooks of the same title, so it was surprising to see it included in the Summer Lunchtime Concert Series in the NCH last Tuesday. To recreate the effect it would have had on its first audiences is hardly possible but Shaun Tirrell (piano) and the NSO under Peter Shannon gave a convincing demonstration of the work's dramatic power.

Borodin's Povtzian Dances and Chavez's Sinfonia India were more typical summer fare and both were played with a real feeling of excitement. Despite Chavez's use of Mexican Indian tunes and instruments it was Borodín's orientalism that came across as the more exotic.

Clinka's Russlan and Ludmilla overture is a brash piece, so much more European than Russian, more interesting in what it led to than in itself. It provided a vigorous opening to the programme.

Douglas Sealy