Reviews

Irish Times critics review the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Cork and Just A Little One at Bewley's Café Theatre in Dublin

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry House, Co Cork

There's a view out there that the world of classical music is conservative and staid, that audiences are caught in the old bind of knowing what they like and only liking what they know. But the hits with the audiences at Friday's concerts in Bantry House were all well off the beaten track, pieces that no promoter in his or her right mind would use as the basis for selling a concert.

Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu's short ballet, La Revue de Cuisine (1927), is one of the stream of 1920s works which took inspiration from jazz and popular music. In the performance by the Altenberg Trio, with Mark O'Keeffe (trumpet), Deirdre O'Leary (clarinet) and Marc Trénel (bassoon), the Altenberg's pianist, Claus-Christian Schuster, set exactly the right tone of dry, wry playfulness, and O'Keeffe kept the trumpet-playing nicely in scale in this rare domestic outing for Martinu's tart, tongue-in-cheek score.

The Tatar composer, Sofia Gubaidulina, is today known for a musical style which marries spiritual concerns and a fondness for the exploration of advanced performing techniques. In the 1950s she was writing music of a much simpler cast. Her Piano Quintet dates from 1957, when she was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, her experiments with electronic music and improvisation, and her conflict with the Soviet authorities, all ahead of her - fellow composer Tikhon Khrennikov would denounce her work as late as 1979 for being too abstract and appealing to capitalism.

The Piano Quintet is a showy piece, Shostakovich and water in terms of musical style, but with the high entertainment value of a colourful circus turn. Finghin Collins took to the piano writing with the alacrity of a greyhound after a hare, and his admirable, free-flowing energy was matched by the members of the St Petersburg Quartet.

The late evening concert given by mezzo soprano Cristina Zavalloni and pianist Andrea Rebaudengo was a tribute to the American singer, Cathy Berberian, muse and first wife of composer Luciano Berio. The programme included early Berio (the Canzoni popolari from the late 1940s), Falla (the Siete Canciones populares Españolas), and some Beatles arrangements by Louis Andriessen (of which Ticket to Ride re-conceived in the manner of a Brandenburg Concerto was the most amusing). But the real showstopper was Berberian's own Stripsody for solo voice, a short snippet of propless music theatre created out of comic-strip sounds.

Berberian was not just a singer or a voice, but rather a range of singers and voices, and Zavalloni's performance captured a real sense of their character and sounds.

The day also included a recital of cello sonatas, Sonia Wieder-Atherton making heavy emotional weather of Fauré, Britten and Kodály, and her partner at the piano, Artur Pizarro, sounding so light-fingered he often lost the harmonic anchorage of the music. The opening clarinet, cello and piano recital (Romain Guyot, Wieder-Atherton and Finghin Collins in Poulenc, Schumann and Brahms), offered more substantial musical rewards.

Irish composers often feel hard done by in terms of the international exposure that comes their way. On Saturday, the first inclusion of a substantial work by a Swedish composer in the West Cork Chamber Music Festival gives an interesting perspective on the difficulties they face. Sweden is a more populous country than Ireland, with a much longer and richer tradition of composition, yet it's taken 10 years at a festival programming up to four or five concerts a day for one of Sweden's major figures to get a look in.

Allan Pettersson (1911-1980) is a man whose symphonies - there are 16 of them in all - developed something of a cult following in the decade before the composer's death. The focus in Bantry was on an early work, a Concerto for violin and string quartet written in 1949.

Francis Humphrys's programme note suggests that the composer "specifically associates this work with the deprivation and poverty that he saw as a child". The gritty performance by Viviane Hagner and the Leipzig Quartet dealt head-on with the work's grim tone and harsh sounds.

The music's piling up of dissonant strands had at times a feeling of wanton, perhaps even rant-like indulgence. Pettersson showed a fearlessness in creating a seething mass of dark clashes that would make even the heaviest passages of composers such as Schoenberg or Ives seem light by comparison. In terms of impact, the work didn't benefit from being placed after the Altenberg Trio's intense performance of Chausson's overweight Piano Trio in G minor, itself a draining experience.

Of the day's two works involving wind, it was Weber's Clarinet Quintet which gave the greatest pleasure, played by Romain Guyot and the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet with a communicative delight in the mercurial virtuosity of Weber's writing. The performance of Schubert's Octet (Guyot and the St Petersburg Quartet with Marc Trénel on bassoon, Stephen Stirling on horn and Hans Roelofsen on double bass) lacked the lightness of touch and freedom of interplay to show this marvellous piece at its best.

Viviane Hagner was joined by Hartmut Rohde (viola) and Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello) for a midday programme of Schubert, Françaix and Beethoven. The string trio is one of the most challenging of combinations, and these three players best managed to hide the stresses involved in the frothy entertainment of Jean Françaix's early trio.

The late-night concert promised to be a special event, Janácek's rarely heard song cycle, The diary of one who vanished, in Seamus Heaney's translation. Tenor Christopher Gillett, although under the weather from an infection, bravely consented to go ahead with the performance. Sadly, his distress was obvious, and he was let down by the heedless volume of Joanna MacGregor's piano playing, which the unfortunate singer had no hope of matching, and which often turned Janácek's carefully wrought harmonies into a sort of Glastonbury mud.

One of the considerations that keeps this cycle on the sidelines is the number of singers involved. On this occasion, mezzo soprano Ruby Philogene was touching as the gypsy girl, and the parts of the small chorus of three women were beautifully handled by Méav Ní Mhaolchatha (soprano), Deirdre Moynihan (soprano), and Niamh O'Connell (mezzo soprano).

Michael Dervan

Just A Little One

Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin

This show is subtitled "A Dorothy Parker Cocktail", and the surprising thing is that the name of its subject rings out so clearly over the decades since her death in 1967, at the age of 74. She left no memorable body of work behind her, just a handful of poems, short stories and critical journalism, but her acid wit and high-flying lifestyle supplemented these to create something of a personal legend.

This light-hearted tribute show, devised by the company, turns some of her short stories into near-vaudeville sketches, set in the days of the flapper and the speakeasy. The two performers, Susannah de Wrixon and Karen Egan, fuse their talents in such items as 'The Telephone', with a woman agonising over whether to phone a male Godot who promised to phone her, but hasn't. Two into one goes very nicely here.

There are a couple of songs, too, quite beautifully sung by the duo, both of whom are veterans - in experience, not age - of the cabaret stage. De Wrixon has a hilarious sketch of a sophisticated woman asked to dance by a near-hillbilly, torn between contempt for his gaucherie and the attraction of his masculinity. A final playlet has both performers in a speakeasy, drinking bootleg Scotch and getting steadily drunk. The woman (Egan) has the laugh-lines, and is nicely fed by her partner.

The mix of comedy and near-satire on the sexes generally makes the lunchtime hour fly by. At times the sketch material overstays its welcome, milking one-note laughter for more than it is worth. But the actors, directed by Trevor Knight, are so individually talented and harmonise so well that the longueurs are skilfully bridged.

Runs until July 10th

Sirbu, Paris, RTÉ NSO/Altschuler

NCH, Dublin

Michael Dungan

Dvorák - Wind Serenade. Mozart - Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K364. Dvorák - Symphony No 7.

On paper, the programmes for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's last two Friday night concerts appeared almost identical. Both presented a serenade and symphony by Dvorák and a sinfonia concertante by Mozart. But that's only on paper, with the two Mozart works illustrating the vast differences between the two nights of music. From the previous week, the Sinfonia Concertante K297b is a work whose authorship and quality are questioned and whose impact is light. On the other hand, K364, for violin, viola and orchestra, is better known and superior, reckoned by many to be the jewel in the crown of the composer's string concertos.

It is also deeper. The long first movement, Allegro maestoso, explores a wide emotional range, while the lament-like second movement conveys inner grieving with a searing intensity reminiscent of Bach.

Violinist Mariana Sirbu - familiar to audiences as principal guest director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra - and viola player Massimo Paris played this double concerto in all but name with a rich, rather old-fashioned tone and finely judged expressive warmth. Imitative interplay between the soloists culminates in the slow movement cadenza, in which the chamber-style playing of Sirbu and Paris - long-time colleagues in the ensemble I Musici and in the Quartetto Stradivari - was like two voices discussing unnamed heartbreak in intimate whispers.

Dvorák's Symphony No 7 is less often performed than his popular Ninth, "From the New World", but it is probably his best. Where the Ninth's emotional appeal is direct and strong, the Seventh leavens emotion with greater intellect. The music is serious, on the grand scale, and full of evidence of the composer's admiration for Brahms.

Conductor Vladimir Altschuler was as assiduous in delivering the full, weighty import of this quintessentially romantic symphony as he was in balancing and blending the diverse instrumental colours of Dvorák's Wind Serenade at the start of the concert. The players responded in both works with gutsy, concentrated performances.

Gerry Colgan