Reviews

Irish Times writers review recent events in the arts.

Tinney, RTÉ NSO/Eddins, NCH, Dublin

By Michael Dervan

Thomas Adès - . . . but all shall be well; Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 5 (Emperor); Dvorák - Carnival Overture; Janácek - Sinfonietta.

The music of the lavishly-praised and lavishly-gifted English composer Thomas Adès finally entered the repertoire of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra last Friday.

Adès's rapid rise in the 1990s was frequently compared to that of Benjamin Britten over half a century earlier.

His first opera, Powder her face, was a success de scandale in 1995. The hard-hitting America: A Prophecy was commissioned for the New York Philharmonic's Messages for the Millennium series.

Asyla was chosen by Simon Rattle to open his first concert as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.

And just last month the Covent Garden première of his Royal Opera commission, The Tempest, put contemporary opera in the headlines.

The work played by the RTÉ NSO, . . . but all shall be well, with its title taken from TS Eliot's Little Gidding, was written in 1993 when the composer was 22.

It's in that free-ranging style through which Adès declares that the whole of musical history is his to purloin for his own ends. There's a gentleness in his use of simple scale patterns that fits in with his description of the work as a "consolation" for orchestra, even if the stepwise movement is often inflected with sitar-like slides, and wider, more angular movement is not excluded.

Even in his early 20s his ear for orchestral colour and texture was of an extraordinary imaginative delicacy, allowing him to have the best of the worlds of romanticism and modernity.

The performance under William Eddins sounded a little nervous, as if the players weren't quite ready to indulge fully in the music of a composer who makes indulgence one of his special hallmarks.

There was no lack of that indulgence in Dvorák's festive Carnival Overture which opened the second half, where the enthusiastic use of cymbals and tambourine often created a percussive haze that masked the violin section.

Hugh Tinney was in commanding pianistic form in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, but the emotional tone was one of cool advocacy rather than heightened fervour.

The ever-attentive Eddins chose a style that blended in exactly with the solo playing.

The evening's final work, Janácek's Sinfonietta of 1926, is a piece famous for its brass fanfares, with 12 trumpets providing a sonic spectacle rare in the orchestral repertoire.

Sadly, the work was played in a bowdlerised reduction, which not only altered the colour of the music at various points, but, with only four trumpets onstage, inevitably removed some of the actual musical material.

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Virginia Rodrigues, Liberty Hall

By Siobhan Long

It was a long time coming but the wait was most definitely worth it. Ever since her spellbinding 1997 debut Sol Negro, Virginia Rodrigues has navigated a stratospheric path where her celestial vocals soar free.

What is it about that voice?

It's indescribably poignant and yet somehow as strong as silk.

Her three albums knew none of the cosseting public relations splurges so beloved of lesser artists, yet they've effortlessly insinuated themselves into a discerning public's subconscious.

Rodrigues' Brazilian roots are as seductive as they are exotic.

Discovered while singing in a local church choir in her native Salvador, her heavenly vocals have been championed not only by Brazil's own beloved Caetano Veloso, but by world music buffs from Latin America to Africa, not to mention those in Kiltimagh and Gneeveguilla.

With the lung capacity of a Costeau and a larynx both leonine and feral, she ventured tentatively into a back catalogue that swung from Christian chant to ebullient celebration and lusty funk, melding the sacred and the secular with the ease of one long practised in the intricacies of navigating a world populated by countless competing religions.

With the luxury of cello, clarinet, guitar and percussion tiptoeing their way in between the vocals, Rodrigues gradually loosened the chains of apprehension that stymied her performance for over half the repertoire, so that her initial physical discomfort (and distracting insistence on tugging at a voluminous shawl) melted away to reveal a sensual side that flourished in the midst of the music.

It was a concert for which we waited long and with much anticipation, and not surprisingly, Rodrigues struggled to reach the heights to which we urged her.

But finally, with the opening chords of Ojú Obá, she took flight.

Mirroring the flute lines with the precision of a shadow dancer, the notes freed her, body and soul.

Finally, she took possession of the stage, and even engaged in a lusty bum rap with her beloved percussionist.

Fortified by Rodrigues' genre-bending soulfood, we reluctantly loped back out into the cold night, somehow suspecting that the best was yet to come.

If only she'd had a second night to truly enjoy the music with us. Fingers crossed that next time she stays a little longer.