Reviews

Irish Times writers review The Nutcracker at the Helix, the Vogler Quartet at Tullynally Castle, the RTÉ NSO's performance of Stephen Gardner's new concerto and Daniel Léveillé's latest dance work, Amour, Acide et Noix.

The Nutcracker

O'Mahony Hall, Helix

The central message of struggle for happiness often gets missed in productions of The Nutcracker, which, with its child-friendly story and unsophisticated plot, can be a lucrative money-spinner for companies.

The ballet has historically found itself torn between E.T.A. Hoffmann's dark story and sugary fairy scenes, with milestone productions oscillating between the two.

Choreographers Lev Ivanov and Vasily Vainonen saw The Nutcracker as a simple children's fairytale, whereas Fedor Lopukhov in 1929 was drawn back to Hoffmann's text and satirised the middle classes in Old Russia. Not surprisingly the touring St Petersburg Ballet's production belongs to the former tradition, but it still doesn't allow flashy effects disguise secure and stylish dancing.

Although not offering the dramatic range of Aurora or Odile/Odette, Irina Kolesnikova brings the same commitment to the part of Clara as she displayed in last year's productions of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.

You sense there is less thinking and more feeling in her dancing of a part sometimes played by a child, and she shows off her effortless musicality and beautiful phrasing while maintaining a wide-eyed wonderment at events unfolding in her dream of the Land of Snow and the Land of Sweets.

Alongside her Dmitry Akulinin had a nightmare. His absent-minded partnering as the Nutcracker Prince almost led to one accident as Kolesnikova slipped his grasp and his own solos were insecure, many jumps ending with splayed feet and a thud audible above the orchestra.

Placing dance above spectacle sometimes backfired, and an underpowered Act 2 contained a pretty limp battle between the forces of The Mouse King and Nutcracker, but was saved by Nastassia Khabarova's Snow Queen and the corps de ballet.

The character dances in Act 3 are the real crowd-pleasers. Alexei Ilin's treacly Arabian Dance and the bravura of Olga Ozhogina, Lada Vedernikova and, particularly, Sergei Emelianov in the Russian Dance were the clear audience favourites.

Michael Seaver

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Vogler Quartet

Tullynally Castle Castlepollard

Haydn - Quartet in C Op 76 No 3.

Bach - Cello Suite No 2 in D minor BWV1008.

Schubert - String Quintet.

This concert, the second in the Vogler String Quartet's five-venue tour, was an occasion to remember. There is something extraordinarily virile about their playing definition, a certainty about what it wants to achieve, and at its best a communicative power that eclipses passing concerns about detail.

Haydn's Quartet in C Op. 76 No. 3 (Emperor) was driven by a strong discourse between players who worked sometimes as individuals, sometimes as pairs, and so on. The slow movement had an eloquence worthy of its subject - a set of variations on the noble Emperor's Hymn, and the energy of the Presto finale was compelling.

For Schubert's Quintet the Vogler Quartet was joined by cellist Jan Vogler, cousin of the first violinist.

He also played Bach's Cello Suite No 2 in D minor BWV1008, and it is hard to imagine an account that could be more muscular, or closer to this music's origins in dance. Underlying the flexibility of phrasing and strong shaping of detail was a rock-steady control of metre. It was a striking example of technical control, stylistic intelligence and musical vitality.

The Schubert is a prime specimen of the "heavenly length" that Schumann so admired in this composer's instrumental music. That reputation has often encouraged performances that linger too much for a work that is deeply concerned with the drama of ideas.

There was no such problem with the Voglers' long-breathed, passionate playing. The music moved always-forward, even when the tempo was slowing; contrasts of ideas were highlighted through a remarkable range of colours and subtle differentiation in pacing; from the slow movement to the Presto of the Scherzo, the music was full of rhythmic life.

This was a performance of rare stature, worthy of one of the greatest works in all chamber music.

Martin Adams

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Collins, RTÉ NSO/Markson

NCH, Dublin

Stephen Gardner - NEVER...NEVER...NEVER.

Ravel - Piano Concerto in G.

Beethoven - Symphony No 3 (Eroica).

Stephen Gardner's new concerto for orchestra.

NEVER...NEVER...NEVER is the second orchestral work inspired by Francis Bacon's triptych Three Screaming Popes.

The first, written by Mark-Anthony Turnage in the late 1980s, was not intended as a piece of programme music. Belfast-born Gardner, however, describes his new piece as "an interpretation of an imaginary painting", his fantasy having been fired by thinking of what Bacon might have painted with the DUP leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, as his subject.

The title is taken from an anti-Anglo-Irish Agreement speech by Dr Paisley, and both its emphatic capital letters and repetition are reflected in the music, the former most obviously by a pair of military drums which drive towards the conclusion with insistent force.

Gardner paints his effects with bold, sometimes rough strokes. There are clustery hazes with Ivesian overtones, melodic patterns which bring moments from Stockhausen to mind, and the military overtones of the drumming inevitably suggest shades of Shostakovich.

But the music is in truth like none of these. Gardner's target was to portray the unyielding defiance of his subject, and he pushes at boundaries with a bluntness which seems to know no compromise.

In Friday's première, conductor Gerhard Markson took the piece at face value, both in its moments of quiet impassivity and its relentless drive. This is music which may well try its listeners' patience. It's certainly expressed with a persuasive force that's unlikely to leave any audience neutral.

The exertions of the Gardner may explain but not forgive the many and sometimes quite extraordinary lapses in the orchestra's playing of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G.

Soloist Finghin Collins responded zestily to the extrovert invitations of the outer movements, though, as in the soulful slow movement, his efforts were hampered by imbalances which found important contributions from the orchestra too reticently stated.

There was nothing reticent in Markson's driving account of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, a performance which spoke of unswerving faith in the music and was delivered with urgent communicativeness. The sweep was irresistible even when some of the details of its expression seemed arguable. With Raymond Leppard's Seventh of 1993, and William Eddins's Fifth of 2002 it stands as one of the most engaged and engaging Beethoven performances I've heard this orchestra give.

Michael Dervan

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Amour, Acide et Noix Institute of Choreography and Dance, Firkin Crane, Cork

The notoriously benign dance critic Edwin Denby once remarked about an overly-long pedestrian dance: "Once you got past the anger and feeling physically sick, you could watch this stuff all night."

Things weren't anyway near as bad as that in Daniel Léveillé's latest work, Amour, Acide et Noix, but there was a sense that the more you watched the constant repetitions of phrases the more the work managed to seduce you.

The four naked performers walk matter-of-factly on an equally bare stage, turn and glare at the audience before slowly introducing the phrases and motifs that will appear throughout the piece. The short motifs emerge quickly from stillness and disappear just as quickly and a stuttering movement rhythm is established, in contrast to the regular pulse of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Throughout the hour-long piece solos, duets and quartets appear, almost like snapshots, with no obvious development of form or narrative.

In spite of a self-claimed expression of "an infinite tenderness", much of what happens is alienating. The movement vocabulary is unreleased, and so the performers' bodies appear bound and tight, and coupled with the steely, neutral gaze, exude a paradox of self-consciousness and self-importance. With their different performing energies and varied physiques the dancers do vary the material but the overall range of expression is narrow.

Michael Seaver