Reviews

Irish Times writers review Bic Runga at The Village, Corban Walker at the Fenton Galler in Cork, Concorde/O'Leary at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and the David Berkman Quartet in Whelans in Dublin.

Bic Runga

The Village, Dublin

Kevin Courtney

The oriental-looking girl in the floral dress and black stockings smiles shyly, straps on her electric guitar and picks out the chords of The Be All And End All. She has hardly sung the first two lines when, distracted by someone in the audience, she breaks into nervous laughter, but although she nearly loses her composure she doesn't lose the lyrical thread of the tune. Bic Runga is playing the second of two sold-out

nights, but she still doesn't seem to have settled in.

The singer-songwriter-musician- arranger-producer and all-round good-looking babe from New Zealand has found a new audience in this hemisphere, and Sunday night was the final date of a successful jaunt around Britain and Ireland. She heads back to New Zealand to begin a tour of churches, a measure of the reverence she is held in at home.

Everyone here has heard the catchy single Get Some Sleep - it has been on high rotation on most big radio stations and its parent album, Beautiful Collision, has gone in to the Irish charts at No 20.

Yes, we like Runga round these parts, and if it takes her a while to get comfortable on stage, well, we're a forgiving as well as a welcoming race. Not only has she a lovely face - a seductive mix of Chinese and Maori - she also has a lovely, feline voice, pitched somewhere between Aimee Mann's slinky purr and Natalie Imbruglia's plaintive

mew.

As if that's not enough, Runga also plays funky organ and folksy harmonica.

I wouldn't have been surprised if she had

pulled out a flugelhorn midshow.

She seems, however, to be having trouble with her sound. "Is that OK for you?" she asks the crowd on the balcony. "Cos it sounds weird up here."

She's a perfectionist, all right, her face scrunched in concentration as she battles to hit the notes and nuances bang on. She eventually wins, Get Some Sleep allowing her to stretch her vocal muscles and Beautiful Collision letting her put shape and subtlety on them.

Her band, comprising a Frenchman, an Australian and two Irishmen, bring tasteful, inventive backing to such songs as Election Night, Gravity, Something Good, Honest Goodbyes and Sway.

Alan Gregg from the support band, Marshmallow, joins her on stage for a rendition of Lee Hazlewood's Summer Wine, bravely challenging the version by Bono and Andrea Corr.

The next time Runga plays here, at the Oxegen festival in July, she'll be an even bigger star and, with luck, feeling a little more self-assured.

Corban Walker

Fenton Gallery, Cork

Mark Ewart

Corban Walker's photographs capture subjects that many people would pass by without ever noticing, training his lens to frame only the most refined and elegant of compositions.

His subjects are predominately architectural, selecting details from facades and interiors of contemporary buildings. He explores the rhythms and tensions within pattern in a number of the images, often highlighting the reflective properties of glass and the precision of steel. The influence of pattern extends beyond architecture in to fields and foliage or in to the serendipitous texture found in a raked gravel surface. In all there is an almost Zenlike poise and tranquillity.

The concept of art in the everyday follows through in to the sculptural work also, as he uses materials common to the built environment to create two arresting installations. These are in the atmospheric vault spaces of the gallery, which lend perfectly to Walker's work. Station (N.E.S.W) consists of carefully aligned fluorescent tubes mounted on transformers that act as plinths, from which a tangle of cables is strewn around the floor.

The obvious fragility of these objects is turned on its head as they unify in to a commanding entity that one imagines has some sinister purpose or function, such as draining the energy from the surrounding area rather than creating it.

Village comprises simply glass tiles piled on top of each other, reflecting and refracting light beautifully. By accident or design, this light also ricochets on to the back wall, projecting a pattern of irregular rectangles that soak into the rough texture of the wall. Many abstract painters would be envious of the results.

Runs until March 19th

Concorde/O'Leary

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Michael Dungan

Jarmo Sermilä - Contours. Martin Butler - Bluegrass Variations. Calliope Tsoupaki - Trio. Kaija Saariaho - Die Aussicht. Thoma Simaku - Reflexions De La Croix I

The bluegrass elements of Bluegrass Variations for solo violin by the English composer Martin Butler are pretty much embedded. What's on the surface is a virtuosic test piece composed for the 1988 Carl Flesch violin competition. Concorde's Elaine Clark navigated its leaps, arpeggios and Appalachian-scented double-stopping with assurance.

The first of the concert's two Irish premières was Contours by Finland's Jarmo Sermilä. The piece's most arresting passage comes midway through, when a single pitch is passed quietly and at some length among the four instruments - violin, cello, flute and clarinet - seemingly randomly but offering an intensely focused and effective contrast to the skittish energy that goes before and after. The second Irish première was the 2002 Trio for flute, bass clarinet and piano by the Greek composer Calliope Tsoupaki. Her sometimes impressionist music is a wistful response to the short story Star Of The Seaside: a strange light in the sky, the man who tries to follow it and the girl whose tears have created it.

Soprano Tine Verbeke was clear voiced and forthright in Die Aussicht, a gentle but unsettled five-minute "dream song" by the leading Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The text, unfortunately not provided, was written by Friedrich Hölderlin when he was mentally ill and looking forward to a future union of nature and "man".

This consistently low-key concert closed with the world première of Reflexions De La Croix I by the Albanian Thoma Simaku. The piece was as described by the composer in a spoken introduction: essentially static but with various musical activities driven by a dronelike element and anchored in a four-note chord on the vibraphone. In his Albanian childhood, he points out, "there was no cross to be seen anywhere except in one's conscience".

David Berkman Quartet

Whelans, Dublin

Ray Comiskey

A return visit by David Berkman saw the brilliant New York-based pianist and composer bring a stellar quartet to Whelans. With him were longtime colleagues Dick Oatts (alto, soprano and flute) and Nasheet Waits (drums), with Johannes Weiden- muller providing a fulcrum for the group's far-flung improvisations from the bass.

All the material, apart from a solo piano encore devoted, touchingly, to Billy Strayhorn's Blood Count, written three days before he died of leukaemia, was composed by Berkman. Typically angular pieces, written with an ear for their improvisational options and, frequently, with particular players in mind, they functioned as a kind of structural reference for some of the freest blowing heard here so far this year.

A lengthy first set embraced only five performances, Weird Knack, Triceratops, Tom Harrell, Iraq and Slides, and although the standard remained high some pieces worked better than others. Berkman produced a gem of a piano solo on Tom Harrell, and while the quartet closed the first set with a wild and impressive outing on Slides, perhaps their finest collective moment was on Iraq, a lament with Sturm und Drang that Berkman called "our first protest song", which saw Oatts play beautifully on soprano.

Berkman called Back In The 90s, a more or less straight-ahead tribute to the late pianist Kenny Kirkland, to open the second set. Oatts, back on alto, seemed more at home in this context, and he was excellent, too, on alto on Blue Poles, a piece inspired by a Jackson Pollock painting.

On what was a good rather than a memorable night's music, Berkman remained the most interesting soloist. But the outstanding performer was Waits. In a textbook demonstration of playing "outside" and "inside", he was so consistently and incredibly responsive to every nuance in the group's explorations that he frequently took the breath away. And his superb contribution to the music was never done at the expense of dominating what was going on.