Reviews

Evening concerts at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, a night of classical music in the Ulster Hall and jazz from Dublin are reviewed.

Steven Isserlis and Prussia Cove musicians, Kilkenny Arts Festival

The International Musicians' Seminar at Prussia Cove in Cornwall was founded by the late Sándor Végh in 1972 and its current artistic director is cellist Steven Isserlis.

Two evening concerts at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, held in St Canice's Cathedral on Friday and Sunday, were given by Isserlis in partnership with three musicians who have worked at Prussia Cove - Japanese violinist Arisa Fujita, British viola player Rachel Roberts and French pianist Sarah Tysman.

Each programme offered a major work by Dvorák, the largest of his piano trios, the F minor, Op. 65, sitting between Beethoven's C minor String Trio and Josef Suk's teenage Piano Quartet on Friday, his mature Piano Quartet in E flat following Beethoven's rarely-heard Eyeglass Duo (the strange nickname, Beethoven's own, stems from the fact that it was written for some short-sighted friends) and Smetana's G minor Piano Trio on Sunday.

The strongest performance of the two concerts came at the very start, in the Beethoven trio. Writing for string trio has never sparked the imagination of composers with the same frequency as the string quartet, and many great names simply gave the medium a miss.

The temptation of making just three instruments emulate the familiar richness of four has created a genre that's full of pitfalls for performers, as the amount of double-stopping involved can make for a stress-laden style of performance.

Isserlis, Fujita and Roberts responded to the particular challenges of Beethoven's C minor Trio with playing of unusual lightness and fleetness, changing the mood of the music slightly in the process, but also, exceptionally, making the medium sound fluid and easy.

The Eyeglass Duo for viola and cello is a lesser work and didn't take flight in the same way in performance.

Although Isserlis was the headline attraction in these concerts, in all the other works the greatest burden in performance falls on the pianist. Tysman showed great skill and resourcefulness in the delicacy with which she cast herself in a supporting role.

But that's how she mostly sounded, as an extremely busy but essentially unobtrusive prop for the other instruments.

Unfortunately, that's not at all how Dvorák, Smetana and Suk conceived the pieces on offer, and Tysman's failures of left-hand assertiveness were particularly debilitating, often to the point of robbing the music of a solid harmonic foundation.

Fujita and Roberts were consistently stronger, but those moments when the cello was cast into the spotlight, most notably in the slow movement of the Dvorák Piano Quartet, offered playing that was simply in another league, unforced and unfussy, apparently simple in detail, yet carrying messages of an expressive complexity that none of the other players could rival.

Among the works involving piano, it was actually Suk's early Piano Quartet that brought the most consistently persuasive playing from the group.

And, as Lyric FM microphones were present for the occasion, with one placed very close to the piano, it may well be that radio listeners will benefit from a musically balanced perspective that never fully materialised for the audience at St Canice's Cathedral. - Michael Dervan

Ulster Orchestra, Adrian Leaper, Ulster Hall, Belfast

Albéniz Almería (from Iberia)
Napoleão Piano Concerto
Halffter Sonatina

Alfredo Napoleão, who died in 1917, is the first Portuguese composer we have met in the current series of free BBC Invitation Concerts devoted to music from Latin America and the Iberian peninsula. In his day he was acclaimed as a pianist but ignored as a composer, and the present work apparently had to wait until 1941 for its first performance. No other concerto starts like this; these sultry mutterings and tense string tremolandos could be the introduction to an operatic scene. But when the piano enters, the style becomes Chopinesque with a slight Iberian accent, and with succeeding movements the music becomes more conventional. The glittering solo writing, however, found a worthy exponent in Artur Pizarro, who has championed this work in recent years.

Halffter's Sonatina, a ballet score from the late 1920s, reinforces suspicions that the Spanish National School went off the boil after the first World War. The story of "a princess who is so sad not even her dragon can cheer her up", it is all very nicely orchestrated and, like all the programme, given a tasteful, carefully balanced performance by the Ulster Orchestra under Adrian Leaper. But most of it is unmemorable, and it urgently needs someone to make a concert suite of the best bits. The resulting composition would not be long, but it would be worth listening to.

The most sheerly enjoyable piece was the opening excerpt from Albéniz's Iberia, given a discreet 20th-century tinge by Carlos Surinach's orchestration. - Dermot Gault

Larry Coryell, Melanie O'Reilly, Green Room, Holiday Inn, Dublin

Texan guitarist Larry Coryell and Irish singer Melanie O'Reilly met several years ago at the Cork Jazz Festival and have since collaborated occasionally. A big crowd turned out on Sunday night to see them renew their acquaintance at the Green Room. It was an outstanding night of jazz.

O'Reilly opened the show with a selection of songs from her new album, backed by Fintan O'Neill (keyboards), Antoine Simoni (bass) and Romain Piot (drums). She is hard to pin down, blending jazz and traditional Irish elements and constantly experimenting with styles. Her songs were all concerned with Irish emigration to America. Perhaps most interesting was Tomorrow I'll be Leaving, which started out in triple time with a gentle folk-style melody before building theatrically through shifting tempos and time-signatures. Her songs were all engaging and unpredictable.

Coryell was on next, backed by the same trio. He has long been one of the most respected guitarists in jazz. He opened with a relaxed blues, on which his warm tone and melodic improvising were strongly reminiscent of Wes Montgomery. He turned up the heat with aggressive, high-speed soloing on his own Places Revisited and closed the set with a solo, steel-string acoustic version of the Beatles's She's Leaving Home. Here, he made the melody sing out, reprising it at one point in dazzlingly precise artificial harmonics. This was understated virtuosity that gave pride of place to the melody.

For the final part of the evening, O'Reilly and Coryell joined forces for a series of standards. The ballads were more convincing than the up-tempo tunes, partly because of Coryell's superb accompaniments, which managed to be highly ornate yet unobtrusive. The highlights were A Day in the Life of a Fool and an exquisite encore of Danny Boy. - Alex Moffatt