Reviews

Reviewed: Petcu-Colan, violin, Spiritualizedand Bobby McFerrin

Petcu-Colan, violin

TCD Chapel, Dublin

New music by Louise Harte, Garrett Sholdice, Scott McLaughlin, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, David Coonan, David Flynn.

This concert presented violinist Ioana Petcu-Colan in the premieres of six new pieces.

It opened with Louise Harte's Swimming out of Depth, not quite communicating all the metaphorical ideas contained in her meditation-like programme note, but nonetheless evoking a littoral landscape with surf sounds on tape beneath a simple violin part.

Nor was the connection between written description and music easy to appreciate in Scott McLaughlin's Intra.

Professing an interest in "cellular automata and similar techniques as proliferative methods", McLaughlin says his piece "explores within-ness and duality".

Once you survived the note, the music was interesting: violin unisons and octaves slipping in and out of phase in a delicate atmosphere intriguingly complemented by sounds akin to the inner workings of a mantlepiece clock in the part for prepared guitar played by David Flynn.

darkly he rose, and then I slept is Garrett Sholdice's abstract response to a conversation between a poet and the sun in a poem by Frank O'Hara. This gently effective piece, which consists of long-held notes and intervals derived from a harmonic series, really came to life thanks to Petcu-Colan's expressive intensity.

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's 17-minute Ekstase I featured 15 minutes of a single, slow, two-note figure continuously repeated. Petcu-Colan demonstrated monstrous concentration as she engineered two glacially graded crescendo/decrescendos spanning about seven minutes each. Perhaps some listeners were mesmerised into a state of tantric ecstasy. I sat cursing my cowardice for not shouting out that the emperor was naked.

The melodic fragments in David Coonan's Breath - some hesitant, some dancing, some pretty - offered massive relief following the mind-numbing claustrophobia of Ekstase I. They also allowed Petcu-Colan to unleash her considerable lyric powers for the first time in the evening.

Lyrical playing featured, too, in Tar Éis an Caoineadh in which David Flynn continues his assimilation of Irish traditional music and contemporary composition. His engaging distortions of and departures from the expected all retain a traditional accent. - Michael Dungan

Spiritualized

Tripod, Dublin

A seething, squalling wash of white noise, bristling its hackles, turns in a heartbeat into the pristine outcrop of calm that is Shine A Light - just two tracks into the set, and all bets are off.

Jason Pierce, the soul of Spiritualized, is touring his new album, Songs in A&E, but track selection tonight is dominated by his back catalogue. His last Acoustic Mainline tour, all lush strings and soaring junctions, has been hacked out and replaced with a solid rock unit, two guitars, bass, keys and drums, with two backing singers.

Live, this looks and feels almost like a rehearsal room, with two singers having wandered in from the gospel choir next door along with the thousand or so people in the audience. The sound is as big as Apollo, rough and raucous, crashing through with great swells of distortion, bass and drums pulsing and popping beneath backing vocals that try to give some dignity to the scenario.

There is a chaotic poignancy to Spiritualized, an emotional charge to the music that vibrates through the atmosphere of the venue. In fact, the only person who seems completely unaffected by this is Pierce; the only words that pass through his lips are sung and there is no interaction with the crowd. Even when one fan bundles his way on stage to leap among the musicians, there is not a flicker of reaction.

But no matter - we were here for the music, and it came in great powerful spadefuls. The numbers on stage might have been stripped down but the sound has lost none of its potency. The guitars are furious, the rhythm section is battering at the gates, but Pierce's vocal almost never moves beyond its languid drawl, creating a push and pull dynamic that's at its most effective on Walking with Jesus and Think I'm in Love.

Then the anthemic Come Together bursts from the stage, swamps the crowd in soaring knife-edged melody, sounding as vital as when Pierce first hammered it out of his distortion pedal 11 years ago.

In 2005, Pierce was on the brink of death from pneumonia; he sings about Jesus often enough, so maybe the lord sent him back to make more music. Amen to that. - Laurence Mackin

Bobby McFerrin,

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Aboriginal songlines, Gregorian chant, choral excavations and jazz and blues inventions: Bobby McFerrin trades in soul-food. To suggest that he's uncategorisable is to merely hint at his eclecticism. Truth is, McFerrin's an artist whose blinding originality has set him on a course that has no maps but is awash with possibilities lurking in every curve on the road.

Much has been made of McFerrin's four-octave vocal range, and it is, truly, a thing of rare beauty: enabling him to dispense almost completely with such mundane considerations as mere words. Using his chest as a percussive force, he ekes out the treble and bass of Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus from the muscles of his thorax; his taut fingers in constant search of the countless rhythms they can call "home".

We might have been at a gospel revival meeting, but when McFerrin blithely asked for a chorus of 12, he could have been overrun with volunteers. Ultimately he conducted almost 40 singers through a lengthy improvisation that tasted of sheer joy in the elemental beauty of the voice.

Earlier, he invoked a magical rhythmic backdrop for a solo dancer (again plucked from the audience), who made hay of his sensual, impish pulses and patterns, her body movements glorying in their sheer unpredictability.

Percussionist Robbie Harris loped on stage, as if to the gallows, but once he settled alongside McFerrin, their molecules merged and he transformed the bodhrán from leaden pace-maker to a time capsule of infinite possibilities.

Liam Ó Maonlaoí brought sean nós and lilting to new plains in McFerrin's company, revelling in his unfettered world where soul and self-expression mean everything and rigid rules are jettisoned - utterly.

A closing Ave Maria', based on Bach's Prelude No 1, stilled the packed audience: McFerrin inhabiting Bach, and transforming the rest of us into choral novitiates in milliseconds.

Yet another bravura performance that celebrates music as a primal essence: as crucial to our sense of ourselves as breathing itself. - Siobhan Long