REVIEWS

Irish Times reviewers take in classical music in its many forms in Dublin, Belfast and Kilkenny .

Northern CO/Ward

Kilkenny Arts Festival

Haydn - Surprise Symphony. Malcolm Arnold - Sinfonietta No 1.

Handel - Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.

Bach - Suite No 3 (exc).

Elgar - Chanson de matin. Chanson de nuit.

Grainger - Shepherds Hey. Handel - Music for the Royal Fireworks.

It's a bright, festive idea, a rather obvious one, actually, to perform Handel's Royal Fireworks Music with fireworks, as was originally intended. Handel knew about the challenges of writing music for outdoor use, and the first performance was given by an oversize orchestra of wind, brass and percussion.

Just two years ago, the French period-instruments ensemble, Le Concert Spirituel, celebrated its 15th birthday with a recreation that attempted to be musically faithful to the original, even down to the instrumental mistunings which most performers still "correct" when playing music from this period.

Saturday's performance, a Kilkenny Arts Festival spectacular held in the grounds of Woodstock at Inistioge, placed the music at the end of a concert by a small chamber orchestra which suffered most of the problems, musical and otherwise, that large-audience, outdoor performances of classical music are prone to.

The organisation of the event was so shambolic that the possibility of starting at the advertised time of 7.30 p.m. was nil. The audience launched into resentment applause at around 8 p.m, and around 15 minutes later the arrival of the corporate guests into the carefully guarded prime seats brought a chorus of booing. The amplification was appalling, among the worst I've ever heard at this kind of event. The low level set at the beginning meant that a lot of Haydn's Surprise symphony was only partially audible, and when the volume level rose the chosen balance presented the orchestra in the grotesque form of a viola solo with accompaniment.

I moved seat for the second half, up close to the front, where although the playing came across louder and clearer, the presentation still made little sense of what the composers had actually written.

The Northern Chamber Orchestra, directed from the violin by Nicholas Ward, struggled throughout the evening to remain in tune and maintain tightness of ensemble. The intentionally jumbled folksiness of Percy Grainger's Shepherd's Hey retained its integrity better than most of the evening's music.

The fireworks, of course, delivered the particular frisson that only fireworks can. For most everything else in this bizarre event, the appropriate response would be the Eurovision thumbs-down of "Null points," especially when you consider that fireworks displays at festivals are usually free events.

Michael Dervan

The Memory of Water

Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny

It had to happen. Three years after its Irish premiere at the Peacock, Shelagh Stephenson's first play now receives the production it deserves.

But the surprise of this vibrant comedy entwined with stands of grief is not that the sardonic tone of Stephenson's northern English voice has been honoured, but that it rings out perfectly with a Scottish accent.

Riding the wit and plumbing the depths of the play, the Edinburgh company Stellar Quines finds three fractious sisters reunited in the seaside home of their deceased mother.

Haunted by memories and secrets, Alexandra Mathie's caustic doctor Mary tussles with Jennifer Black's fretful Teresa, before youngest sister Catherine (Molly Innes) arrives in a whirl of self-absorption and shopping bags. Their bicker grows incandescent, while around them the doll's house details of their childhood fade and Isla Shaw's sensitively attuned set wears away like coastal erosion.

As a first play, Stephenson's text brims with a precocious flair for comic dialogue, never shying from a gloriously tasteless joke, but it comes with a youthful impatience to show off her research, to reach for yet another metaphor, another plot twist.

At times director Muriel Romanes loses patience herself, underlining the pathos of a particular speech with a portentous piano, wielding music like an emotional highlighter.

With a cast so adept at delivering the counterpoint of comedy and bereavement, however, the move is overkill; as superfluous as the abrupt nostalgia of cine reel that dwarfs the stage. If memory fades, the camera is unforgivingly exact.

Ultimately, such excess is quickly forgotten (reliably, our own memory can play tricks), while several scenes - watch for Black's drunken row with long suffering husband Crawford Logan, or Mary Keegan's pristine admonishments as the ghostly mother Violet - offer master classes in performance.

Scabrous, poignant and blissfully unsentimental, this excellent production offers its own memory to be cherished. It continues until 12th August - don't forget it.

Peter Crawley

Peter Barley (organ)

NCH, Dublin

Wagner - March from Tannhäuser.

David Liddle - Valse Locrienne.

Bach - Prelude and Fugue in G BWV550.

Eric Sweeney - The Secret Rose.

Widor - Symphony No 5 (exc).

Peter Barley has been organist and master of choristers at St Patrick's Cathedral Dublin since January 2002. Although he has given recitals in many of the most prestigious venues in Britain and Ireland, this was his first in the National Concert Hall.

He began and ended with valuable reminders of the organ's symphonic possibilities. Reginald Goss-Custard's arrangement of the March from Wagner's Tannhäuser is an accomplished piece of work, and made a rousing opening.

While English, German and American concert organists were specialising in transcriptions of orchestral repertoire, French organist-composers wrote full-scale symphonies for the instrument.

This recital ended with three of the five movements from the most famous of these, Widor's Symphony No 5, which includes the celebrated toccata.

The programme also featured two recent compositions. Valse Locrienne, by the blind English organist-composer David Liddle, is a clever musical palindrome. The Secret Rose, by Ireland's Eric Sweeney, is a concentrated little piece whose techniques - seamless variations on a single, simple idea - are an unusual and effective mixture of modern minimalism and a somewhat French style of harmonic colouring. Peter Barley's playing had that quiet security and well-rounded musicality that inspires confidence; and the first movement of the Widor showed that his playing could be quite fiery.

Some organists might have found his account of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G BWV550 too conservative - straight and not obviously interested in rhetorical flourishes; but like everything in this well-devised programme it had integrity.

Colm Carey plays the organ in the NCH next Friday at 1.05 p.m.

Martin Adams

Ulster Orchestra - Takuo Yuasa.

Ulster Hall, Belfast

Arriaga - Overture "Los Esclavos felices".

Rodrigo - Sarabanda lejana y villancio.

Falla - Siete canciones populares Espanoles.

Gerhard - Suite: Alegrías.

Falla - El amor brujo.

Although most of the music in the current Spanish-themed series of free BBC Invitation Concerts is unfamiliar, a few well-known pieces provide a welcome contrast.

Manuel de Falla, who represents the apex of the Spanish school both musically and chronologically, provides the element of genius which has been missing from the undeniably attractive music played so far in this series.

Falla's style is not only much more passionate, so much more an expression of personal feeling, it is also more concentrated, even in the "Seven popular Spanish songs" which sometimes feel like preparatory sketches for his later work. El amor brujo received an excitingly full-blooded performance from Yuasa, and the Chilean mezzo Graciela Araya, somewhat subdued in the songs, was more involved here.

After Falla the Spanish style rapidly passed its peak, as witness the soporific Rodrigo piece. Roberto Gerhard's 1942 ballet imparts a 20th-century edge to the flamenco style specified by its commissioners, the Ballet Rambert, but for him the solution ultimately was to forsake the Spanish idiom entirely for his own brand of high-energy modernism.

On the other end of the timescalecame a delightful overture from Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, one of music's great might-have-beens (he was only 20 when he died in 1826). Very like early Rossini in places, but with an appealing melodic style entirely his own. It is a pity that the opera from which it comes has not survived (who were the "happy slaves" and what did they have to be happy about?)

Dermot Gault