Irish Times writers review The Importance of Being Earnest in Liberty Hall Theatre in Dublin, West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry in Co. Cork and Piazzolla Toujours/Richard Galliano in Liberty Hall in Dublin
The Importance of Being Earnest
Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
Gerry Colgan
Oscar Wilde's finest comedy requires high production standards - in direction, acting and design - to do justice to its quality. Some past productions have fallen short of these requirements, reducing what ought to be a champagne evening to very small beer. There is no such deflation to be experienced in this Libra Productions outing, a continuous pleasure from beginning to end.
The play itself remains a joy, a comedy which is raised to the level of classic satire by its acute social observations and penetration of human nature. Here we have the upper classes being unwittingly ridiculous, all the more so when they display familiar emotions. Love is a game, high society a self-serving charade, and money matters most. Even the likeable young people are, we can clearly see, destined to become as obtuse as their elders.
As always, the towering figure of Lady Bracknell holds the centre with her clipped epigrams and domineering presence. Glynis Casson is wholly authoritative in the role, brooking no opposition to her diktats and clear-sighted in her assessment of the power of wealth. She is matched by Michelle Donnelly's Cecily, a thrilling interpretation that gets inside the character, and a real show-stealer. Kelly Stone plays Gwendolen, her temporary rival for Ernest, in impressive style.
Another excellent performance is delivered by the versatile Neil Watkins as the rascally Algernon, a supercilious and confident aristocrat pitched nicely to the level of his witty dialogue. David Ryan's Jack jettisons some of the character's traditional gravitas in favour of his twitching, neurotic elements, and Terry Martin's Dr Chasuble is funny almost in the way of the music hall. His romantic opposite, Billie Traynor's Miss Prism, is altogether on the mark. The butlers, played by Joe Cassidy and Eamon Rohan, fit in well.
Noel McDonagh's paced and controlled direction, against Bronwen Casson's mobile set design, brings it all home to much-merited applause - a nice one.
Runs until July 10th
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry House, Co Cork
Michael Dervan
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival is not just a celebration of chamber music through concerts. Each year there's a busy schedule of masterclasses, typically three sessions a day, in which groups of young musicians work under musicians from the festival line-up or tutors whose sole concern in Bantry is teaching.
Ireland's leading young chamber ensemble, the Callino String Quartet, emerged from these masterclasses in 1999, and Sunday's midday Coffee Concert was given by the Iverna Quartet (Michelle Fleming, Kathrin Lenzenweger, Eoin Schmidt-Martin and Jane O'Hara), another group that has been training at the festival.
Their programme was not an easy one, and the inclusion of Alfred Schnittke's Third Quartet of 1983 showed how far the ambitions of leading young musicians in Ireland have moved on in recent years. The distinctive and familiar character of the material Schnittke quotes in this work (Lassus, a late Beethoven quartet, and Shostakovich's musical monogram, DSCH, are clearly tagged in the score) may make this the most readily graspable of the composer's quartets, but it's still quite an undertaking for a young ensemble - Schnittke's sonatas for piano, violin and cello are given a wide berth by most young Irish players.
The Ivernas actually captured the expressive intensity of the Schnittke better than they did the balance of Mozart's Quartet in E flat, K428, where the lower instruments tended to speak with too much weight, and the clarity which comes from high-quality listening between the players wasn't strongly enough in evidence.
That very quality was more apparent in the afternoon performance of Shostakovich's Third Quartet by Anna Cashell, Julia O'Riordan, Catriona O'Hora and Aoife Nic Athlaoich. Cashell played with the authority of a natural leader, fearless in the most technically demanding passages, and though there was some unevenness of achievement between the players, their collective grasp of the task in hand was sure.
The two other ensembles suffered from their repertoire choices. Alison Fahy, Robert Mahon, Tríona Milne and Eoin Quinlan took on Samuel Barber's sole quartet (original source of the famous Adagio), and Lynda O'Connor (violin), Brian O'Kane (cello) and Rebecca Cap (piano) played Arensky's Trio in D minor, Opus 32. Both of these works require a degree of special pleading, with even the familiarity of the Barber Adagio, in its lusher arrangement for orchestral strings, placing an extra burden on it in the context of the quartet. The most impressive moments in these two performances were provided by the long-breathed phrasing of Lynda O'Connor.
The closing concert offered two quintets, Mozart's for piano and wind (Artur Pizarro with Aisling Casey on oboe, Romain Guyot on clarinet, Stephen Stirling on horn and Marc Trénel on bassoon) and Franck's for piano and strings (Pizarro with the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet), with Pizarro often adopting a back-room-style supporting role that wasn't always to the music's advantage.
The final contribution of the St Petersburg String Quartet was the First Quartet by the Georgian composer, Zurab Nadarejshvili, a piece which uses Georgian folk music to reflect stages in Georgia's history, and brought to mind both Arvo Päart (in its quiet patterning) and Giya Kancheli (in the explosive contrast of its central movement).
Piazzolla Toujours/Richard Galliano
Liberty Hall, Dublin
Peter Crawley
In a sports final there has to be a loser. But despite the catch-22 situation of last Sunday night, when the celebrated French accordionist, Richard Galliano, was pitted against the final of Euro 2004, neither a delayed concert nor an abbreviated match viewing could scupper Galliano's magnificent septet.
Of course, Galliano excels at conflict resolution. With his feet planted in the folk form of musette - the elegant French ballroom dance of the early 20th century - and his head swimming with the improvisation of jazz, his métier is a near-paradoxical one: a "new musette" which pivots between tradition and reinvention.
In a tribute to Astor Piazzolla, his friend and mentor, Galliano's deft and emotionally engaged take on "nuevo tango" managed to be at once touchingly faithful and exhilaratingly new.
Lost in the passionate exchanges and icy despairs of Piazzolla's Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, we were not so much listeners as inhabitants, sharing the exquisite sorrow of Sebastien Surel's inconsolable violin and, later, disgracefully enthralled as it deserts a remonstrating bandoneon, pleading in counterpoint.
Time and love are forever running out in the stately, doomed romance of these tangos, leaving Galliano in an agitated flurry of buttons and bellows. Heartbreak rings in the dying fall of a viola, while the pizzicato chatter of the string quartet seems to conspire against us. Inevitably, the taut decorum of chamber music collapses and emotions blow up, smudge and run free like streams of mascara.
Recovering enough to study Galliano's solo bandoneon-playing on Libertango, you notice the improvisational élan that sees him tapping his bellows percussively, then dropping to such a hush that Piazzolla's mysterious theme disappears behind the dispossessed clack of the instrument's buttons.
When an instrument transcends its limits, when tradition and innovation smoothly coalesce, or when the soul of a master survives in another, you can only marvel at such alchemy.
