Reviews

Peter Crawleysaw The Decemberists at Vicar Street, Gerry Colgan reviews  The Night of the Tribades at the Andrews Lane Studio and Michael Dervanwatched the RTÉ NSO/Marksonat the NCH in Dublin

The Decemberists
Vicar Street, Dublin

Before the folk can begin, the folk need to get better acquainted. So it is that the first Irish appearance of the dryly literate and unashamedly poppy The Decemberists begins with a command that audience members first get to know each other. It's the kind of gambit that could easily backfire - but it doesn't.

This is how to invite a crowd inside an unfurling narrative. This is how to introduce a new traditional music.

The Portland, Oregon, six-piece constantly seems balanced between sincerity and send-up. With his book smarts and debating-captain irony, frontman Colin Meloy could have emerged straight from a grad student common room. And the group's fanbase can seem just as collegial. With such a following, you'd be forgiven for thinking that their excellent new album The Crane Wifemust not be approached without a study guide.

Mercifully, there's nothing forbidding about the music, a relentlessly pleasing blend of spry guitar, bouzouki, accordion, piano and occasional glockenspiel which matches ambitious compositions with a variety of tones and a generous store of hooks. The soft lament of The Crane Wife 3runs into the sprawling 12-minute-plus The Island, but all proggy pretensions are defused with the straight ahead jaunt of Billy Liarits Dylan Thomas references notwithstanding.

Given their literary siphonings and air-quote self-awareness, it's hard to defend The Decemberists from a charge of emotional shallowness. We Both Go Down Together, for instance, documenting a joint suicide, has the carefree rhythm of tragedy learned by rote.

But beyond a gamely obeyed sequence of audience callisthenics, a giddyingly orchestrated call and response routine, and Meloy's very funny - if musically worthless - Jimi Hendrix impersonations, this group entertains with a purpose.

Like the lingering verses of The Shankill Butchers, The Decemberists know the true resonance of a folk tale is not is what you tell, but how you tell it.

Peter Crawley

The Night of the Tribades
Andrews Lane Studio

August Strindberg was, in modern parlance, something of a nutter, the tortured genius incarnate. His fellow countryman, Per Olov Enquist, wrote this play about him 30 years ago, setting it in a Copenhagen theatre in 1889. A short piece by his subject has here become a complete drama with three people drawn from real life, and one fictional creation.

The chief character is Strindberg; the two women are his estranged wife Siri, an actress, and Marie, once his lover, whom he now hates implacably. They are joined by Viggo, the effete director of the play awaiting its premiere. The women have had a bitter experience at the hands of the writer, and return his contempt with interest. That process is essentially the play.

If Strindberg wins the contest, it is because the incandescent flame of his art burns too brightly for his opponents. His words carry more poetic venom, and his destructive urge is unrestrained. For him, women are a blend of criminal, baboon and parasite, while they mock his sexual inadequacy, turning the knife in an open wound.

It is an unusual and difficult choice of play for the young actors (Lost Trolley Productions), but they make something worthwhile of it within the limitations of their current stage maturity. Simon Ashe-Browne's Strindberg has voice (maybe too much) and presence. Evie Craddock's Siri is convincing as the rejected wife, and Jane Lundon plays Marie, lesbian and alcoholic. Brian Harley, in the thankless role of Viggo, struggles valiantly with it.

Caroline Staunton's direction has yet to find quite the right balance

Gerry Colgan

RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin

Wagner - Siegfried Idyll
Siegfried's Funeral Music
Mahler - Symphony No 5

Love and death were the themes of Friday's instalment in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's ongoing Mahler symphony cycle.

Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, a combined birthday and Christmas present for the composer's wife Cosima, was given its first performance as a surprise gesture on the stairs of the couple's home.

The title explains the mood of the piece as fully as does the grimly biting Funeral Musicfor Siegfried, taken from Götterdämmerung, the final instalment of the Ring cycle.

The two themes have also been traced in Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

Gerhard Markson's performance on Friday was a tightly-organised affair, as careful of the velvety nap on the string tone in the most intimate moments as of the thrilling surge of the whole orchestra in full flight.

The expressive limitation lay in a tendency to do one thing at a time. The complexity of expressive reach, the contrariety that Mahler allows himself at any particular moment, tended to be marshalled firmly in a single direction rather than tug on different courses.

The Siegfried Idyllis a work which seems to tempt many a conductor into a kind of day-dreaming, dallying rubato. Markson yielded to the temptation early on, and deprived the music of the self-renewing character which is so necessary to sustain a sense of momentum in this piece.

He was altogether more at home in the noble, piercing and grand manner of Siegfried's Funeral Music.

Michael Dervan