After the percussion phenomenon that is Evelyn Glennie, the haunting Siberian throat-singing of Yat Kha and the funky sounds of the king of British jazz Courtney Pine, Belfast's eclectic Rhythm in the City festival enticed another one-off experience onto the main stage of the Waterfront Hall.
Ritmo Flamenco Cubano
Waterfront Hall, Belfast
Ritmo Flamenco Cubano combines the sultry heat of Andalucia with the smouldering danger of the backstreets of old Havana, where the pulsating sounds of guitars and drums seep out of every other doorway and upstairs window. Maria Serrano's ensemble of musicians and dancers thrillingly fuses the flamenco dance tradition of southern Spain with the sensual rhythms and seductive love songs of Cuba, in a style guaranteed to make the hair on the back of the neck stand on end. Serrano herself is the dominating central presence, her tigerish face and sinuous body movements imposing themselves on a loose narrative, choreographed by Spain's Manolo Marin and Cuban Lazaro Noriega.
Around her, a quartet of strutting, posturing male dancers revolve like bees around a honey pot. And, following in her staccato footsteps, are four gorgeous young female dancers, the next in line to inherit the mantle. Their swirling, erotic movements are echoed and, frequently, outshone by the virtuosity of six musicians and two singers, who navigate a wide spectrum of tangos, bulerias, sones and habaneros with tremendous verve and authenticity. Serrano's world-famous troupe is here making its UK and Irish premiere, with a performance which strays daringly into the realms of primaeval mating ritual and voodoo-inspired magic. And while the soft, gyrating movements of Latin dance are swooningly delivered, it is the hard-shoe, heel-tapping zapateado routines, straight out of the cobbled squares of Granada and Seville, which make the collective pulse quicken and the body temperature soar.
It is another triumph for this exciting new festival, which has brought an excellent programme of world music to the streets of Belfast. - Jane Coyle
Katell Keineg
Kingston Hotel, Festival of World Cultures
You could hardly say that DúLaoghaire's Festival of World Cultures failed to fulfil its brief.
Indeed, every culture celebrated could be traced directly back to the world. With such a wide catchment area, however, the festival line-up included local artists with a respectable number of passport stamps, such as Brittany-born, Welsh-raised Dún Laoghaire resident Katell Keineg, who walked to her concert. Talk about a Global Village.
"Basically," shrugged the compère, by way of introduction, "Katell Keineg". Such low-key sentiments were the order of the afternoon, as Keineg peered out from behind her Afghan-Hound fringe to perform such sensitive singer-songwriter staples as Hestia, a forlorn, imploring ballad about relationship difficulties framed around three basic chords.
Pursuing with the three-chord self-eulogising One Hell of a Life, it seemed that, in solo performance, Keineg's songs are distinguished only by the positioning of her guitar cappo.
Elsewhere, she lolled about in her own idiosyncrasies.
Introducing Hitler Was a Mama's Boy, she softly explained, "it's not about motherhood", as though that's the hook upon which our sensibilities might snag. Actually, it was an aggressive song about relationship difficulties that incorporated three basic chords.
If Keineg's set suffered from cappo-reliant musicality and her two-verses-too-many approach to songwriting, it's not as if she didn't have other options.
The inclusion of Partisan, for instance, would have offered a shift in tone and energy to match the splendour of the summer's day, or to challenge her capable voice.
Instead, a work in progress based on Sex and the City fumbled the humour of the TV show, transmuting the experience into a bar-chord ballad about - you've guessed it.
On Your Way, however, struck a delicately arpeggiated balance between melody and sentiment, while the pan-global courtyard congregation happily milled about in Haight-Asbury chic, African ornamentation and Central-European beer. It's a small world after all. - Peter Crawley
David Lee (organ)
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Sunday's recital at St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire, was given by David Lee, organist of Dún Laoghaire Presbyterian Church and organ professor of the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
His programme included nine pieces by six composers, and traced a lineage from Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) to Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), through Heinrich Scheidemann (ca1595-1663, who studied with Sweelinck), Matthias Weckmann (1619-74, who studied with Scheidemann), Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707, who succeeded Franz Tunder, best man at Weckmann's wedding, as organist of the Marienkirche in Lübeck, and later married his daughter), and Nicolaus Bruhns (1665-97, who studied with Buxtehude). Bach himself, of course, famously travelled the 260 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck - on foot, it is said - to hear Buxtehude play. The well-chosen programme, running to just an hour of music, had a feeling of compactness and focus.
Lee is not always the most accurate of performers, and there were problems with one of Sweelinck's Echo Fantasias (distorting the relationship between statement and echo does nothing for this sort of music) and in Bach's ornate chorale prelude, Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr, BWV662, which sounded rather strait-jacketed.
Elsewhere, the feeling for style and expression was strong and deep, with any touches of waywardness seeming to fit into a framework of improvisatory gesture.
The pieces by Weckmann (Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein) and Bruhns (a Praeludium in E minor) had interesting chromatic turns. Bach's great Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565, rounded off the evening in style, in a performance of clear, forward thrust.
But it was an earlier work, the Passacaglia in D minor by Buxtehude, the tensions of its linear intertwinings fully realised, which made the strongest impression. - Michael Dervan
