Irish Times critics review performances from the Tomasz Stanko Quartet at Bray Jazz Festival; pianist Evgeny Kissin at the National Concert Hall, Dublin and The Divine Comedy at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
Tomasz Stanko Quartet at the Bray Jazz Festival
The headline events of Bray Jazz Festival closed at Mermaid Arts Centre on Sunday with one of the finest concerts I've been privileged to hear. And it was no surprise that it came from the star attraction of the festival: the stellar quartet led by the great Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, with Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass) and Michal Miskiewicz (drums).
Apart from the sheer sustained quality of performance they produced, there were other striking things about the group. Perhaps the most immediately arresting was the palpable jolt of hearing the first few bars of the opening Little Thing and the realisation that this was a band that was hitting the ground running; there was no feeling, as with most groups, of needing to settle in to performance mode. This was a band that was right on top of the music from the start.
Another characteristic of the quartet was the vibrant freshness of invention they brought to bear on the material, all of which comes from the group's current, second ECM album, Suspended Night - some of which, incidentally, has appeared on past Stanko albums. Although they have been playing these pieces for more than a year - the album was recorded last July, and the repertoire was the same as that for their London concert last February - the sense of discovery with which they approached it was breathtaking.
This was particularly true of Stanko and Wasilewski. With Kurkiewicz and Miskiewicz providing solidly reliable, responsive and unobtrusive support, the trumpeter and pianist were free to take the music wherever they wished, within or without the boundaries of the compositions. And they did, with the pianist confirming the growing recorded evidence that he has become a front-rank performer in his own right. There was nothing gratuitous about his playing; even at its most involved and exciting there was a feeling of awareness of structure, texture and, especially, of the power of contrast in heightening the drama of his improvisations.
These are virtues that Stanko also has in abundance. He is a poet of sound, a player of compelling depth and originality, who can convey more feeling with one note than many manage in a lifetime. He's also instantly identifiable; that burry, rasping "unclean" sound is unique, a perfectly expressive vehicle for him to say what he has to say. And, like all great players, he lets the music speak for him. There was no cosying up to the audience; the warmth, majesty and respect of the music did that for him. And neither he nor the rest of the group coasted at any point of the two-hour concert; there was no slackening of creativity or intensity throughout. It was, in a word, magnificent.
For the record, the full programme was Little Thing, Song For Sarah, Euforila, Sweet Thing, Gonja, Hetmento's Mood, Troiki, Die Weisheit Von Le Comte Lautréamont, Kaltano, Elegant Piece, Celina and an encore, Theatrical.
Ray Comiskey
The Divine Comedy at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
For a pop star who revels in joined-up thinking, Neil Hannon comes in for inordinate criticism. Yes, he prefaces Our Mutual Friend with an apology to Dickens; yes, he's backed for this concert by a combined string, brass and rock ensemble; yes, his songs have namechecked the likes of Chekhov, Orwell and Kundera; yes, he
cites Scott Walker and Michael Nyman as major influences; yes, he's not so much abrasively funny as acutely witty. But for all this some critics batter him over the head, describing him as pop music's answer to Noel Coward.
What, exactly, is wrong with that? Would they really prefer the likes of Will Young or You're A Star entrants? Try as he might, Hannon can't be anything other than ever so slightly special. What has changed in the past five years, however - what has transformed a cravat-and-smoking-jacket poseur into a more grounded individual - is the realisation that there is more to life than his own concerns. His latest album, Absent Friends, is by far his best work. It effortlessly steps over his previous album, Regeneration (another literary reference, by the way), and forms the basis for this gig, which is the final leg of an ambitious orchestrated run through his music.
New songs such as the title track, The Happy Goth, Leaving Today, Come Home Billy Bird, Sticks And Stones and Charmed Life are performed with an air of archetypal insouciance yet are underpinned with an adult seriousness that marks out Hannon as a songwriter of moving themes.
The primary hits are played, too, of course: National Express, Something For The Weekend, Generation Sex, Becoming More Like Alfie, Songs Of Love. And the comedian Ed Byrne comes on and reads from Bill Hicks's Love All The People while Hannon's The Booklovers plays in the background.
The gig ends with yet another quietly profound autobiographical song, Sunrise, and you are left with the impression that Hannon has matured in every way since the innuendo-driven, flirty archness of years ago. The result? An audience tickled pink but moved to occasional silence.
Tony Clayton-Lea
Evgeny Kissin (piano) at the National Concert Hall, Dublin
Chopin - Polonaises Op 26, Four Impromptus, Polonaise in C minor Op 40 No 2, Polonaise in A flat Op 53.
Medtner - Sonata Reminiscenza Op 38 No 1.
Stravinsky - Three Movements from Petrushka
"I consider him the most talented of all the modern composers. He is, as musician and as man, one of those rare beings who gain in stature the more closely you approach them." This was Rachmaninov's view of his friend and fellow Russian composer Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951). Medtner was, like Rachmaninov, a gifted pianist but, unlike him, a piano composer: everything he wrote - solo pieces, songs, three concertos and a handful of chamber works - included piano.
His music is rarely heard in concert, so it was especially interesting on Sunday to hear how one of Medtner's strange body of sonatas, the Sonata Reminiscenza - the first of the Forgotten Melodies, Op 38, completed in 1922 - would be approached by Evgeny Kissin. The interest stemmed not just from Kissin's status as a player but also from the fact that he counts Medtner as his musical great-grandfather. His own teacher's teacher was Abram Shatskes, Medtner's favourite pupil.
Medtner's harmonies are typically of a pale beauty. The delicate looping that opens and closes the one-movement Sonata Reminiscenza is absolutely characteristic, and the composer is not in the least shy of turning over, again and again, material that appeals to him. The attraction of his music is often textural, something that would have appealed to that master weaver Rachmaninov, and the level of reward for the player often seems higher than that for the audience. Kissin spun the music with care and captured well the strangeness of the sonata's central dissonant outburst.
There was a much greater sense of anticipation, however, attaching to Kissin's handling of Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka. The difficulties of this piece are such that Stravinsky never dared play it in public, and Arthur Rubinstein, for whom it was written, altered it when he played it, and never dared record it, for fear of offending Stravinsky.
Stravinsky, who was notoriously tough on performers of his music, would have had to be dazzled by the fearlessness, stamina and perfection of mechanism in Kissin's account. The composer, whose other piano music has been overshadowed by this work, here wrote one of the great keyboard showpieces of 20th-century music. And Kissin, playing with a rapidity of lateral control that made physical time the servant of musical time, aligned it with the hard lines of The Rite Of Spring rather than the more colourful spray one associates with Petrushka. But he did it with a concentrated conviction and aplomb that made it utterly convincing.
The Chopin polonaises of the first half were delivered more in the manner of public oratory than personal statement, and this suited best the last of the four on offer, the Polonaise in A flat, Op 53, theHeroic. The impromptus spoke in a milder tone, the rapid fingerwork of the Second racing with mesmerising evenness, whether loud or soft, and the Third played in a manner that fascinatingly highlighted elements that Scriabin would later latch on to.
The Stravinsky brought the audience roaring to its feet, and Kissin willingly yielded four encores, traversing the gamut from music of utterly silly but breathtaking brilliance to the quietest, stilling intimacy.
Michael Dervan
