REVIEWS

Paul Hillier's first series as the National Chamber Choir's new artistic director is among today's reviews.

NCC/Hillier

SS Michael and John, Dublin

Per Nørgård Winter Hymn; Buxtehude Missa alla brevis; Veljo Tormis The Bishop and the Pagan; Vaclovas Augustinas Lux aeterna; Bortniansky I life up my eyes to the Mountains; Galina Grigorjeva Svjatki.

The National Chamber Choir's new artistic director and principal conductor, Paul Hillier, is an Englishman who lives in Denmark (where he is chief conductor of the choir Ars Nova) and has also held the post of principal conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Hillier and his Estonian singers have explored the music of the Baltic states on a series of Harmonia Mundi CDs, and he has chosen to follow a similar path for his first series with the NCC, in which he is sharing a "Baltic Blues" theme with three other conductors.

His opening work, Winter Hymn, was by one of Denmark's best-known living composers, Per Nørgård, an arrangement of material from the open-form Winter Cantata made by Swedish conductor Gunnar Eriksson. The music set a tone of simplicity that was enriched in its simple, chorale-like movement by unexpected shifts and sidesteps, and streeling tendrils that altered the harmonic landscape.

Staying with the Danish connection, Buxtehude's late 17th-century Missa alla brevis was by comparison all striding certainty, while Estonian Veljo Tormis's 1992 The Bishop and the Paganrecounted a 12th-century killing through the crude but effective superimposition of pagan bellicosity on the sound-world of plainchant. Lithuanian Vaclovas Augustinas's 2004 Lux aeterna was a sustained, sonorous wallow, as uneventful as a slow-moving cloud on a calm day, apart from some vocal entries that pierced like shafts of sunlight.

The final two works moved further east, to composers who were both born in the Ukraine. Dmitry Bortniansky (1751-1825), admired by Berlioz, dismissed by Tchaikovsky, left a large number of sacred choral concertos, which mix Orthodox sonorities with Western practices. Thursday's performance of I Lift Up My Eyes to the Mountains, was, to the best of my knowledge, the NCC's first venture into this intriguing repertoire.

The performing standard of the NCC has been wobbling a bit of late, but Hillier's presence is already boding well, bringing a sharpening of focus and control, and a range of new colours to the singing.

Nowhere was this more evident in the closing piece by Galina Grigorjeva, who's now based in Estonia. Her work was short but remarkably intense in its mood of celebration.

Michael Dervan

Music in Great Irish Houses festival

Angela Hewitt (piano) Pekka Kuusisto (violin)

National Gallery, Dublin

Bach The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books I II

Dublin was 38th of the 51 cities to which Bach luminary Angela Hewitt is bringing the monumental 48 preludes and fugues. The unprecedented tour - which began in Oslo last August and winds up in Shanghai next October - is as encylopedic as the musical matter itself.

At around four-and-a-half hours of playing spread over two evenings, each presentation of the 96 pieces is on a scale grander than most living musicians would contemplate. As if that were not enough, Hewitt is by now performing the two cycles from memory - with consequences that are both troublesome and highly distinctive.

Without the safeguard of a score, advancing fatigue meant that a couple of the later Book Ifugues had to be restarted. All went well in Book IIuntil the final fugue, whose yielding to a third attempt drew a viscerally sympathetic audience unhesitatingly to its feet.

Since making her refreshingly direct recordings, Hewitt seems to have taken these pieces as far interpretively as she's already taken them in air miles. The style, with generous pedalling and a boundless dynamic range, is now unrepentantly pianistic.

Subtle echo effects are being applied to those preludes that can take them, much of the rapid passagework is accelerating into daredevil coloratura, and extremely flexible timekeeping is uprooting the rhythm from its humble dance origins.

Memorisation, it seemed, is obliging navigation by landmark rather than by map, so that even the most continuous items felt sectionalised. An extreme example was the last fugue from Book I, where every entry lurched to a hesitant start.

This, though, was also the most consistently rewarding aspect of the whole experience: that each subject, answer, inversion and pedal point was celebrated in its own ingenious way.

At the centre of this summer's Gallery Gatherings - the informal and accessible strand of the Music in Great Irish Housesfestival - was the irrepressible Finnish fiddler Pekka Kuusisto.Versatile isn't a strong enough term for this musician: the variety spanned by his four concerts suggested that no style could lie beyond his grasp.

A soirée of Japanese flavour had been planned with traditional Baltic harpist Eva Alkula. Her last-minute unavailability cued instead the outgoing Finnish jazz singer Annamari Kähärä, as well as some nifty live electronics balletically toe-controlled by Kuusisto himself.

One hefty lunchtime concert included a turbulent, colourful yet cogent view of Bach's solo violin Partita in D minor BWV 1004. Some gruffly pastoral effects in the C minor Sonata BWV 1017, and some quasi electronic ones in Messiaen's Louange á l'immortalité de Jésus, were accompanied with élan by pianist Peter Tuite. In his gripping solo account of Messiaen's La buse variable, Tuite conjured sounds of delicious complexity from an exclusive Fazioli grand, which was on gracious loan to the festival for Angela Hewitt's performance of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

For a moving tribute to the doomed Jewish composers of the Theresienstadt ghetto, Kuusisto was joined by accordionist Dermot Dunne, pianist Dearbhla Collins and soprano Lynda Lee.

Dunne was back the next day, along with clarinettist Carol McGonnell, for an upbeat family concert attended by students from the Central Remedial Clinic. The students had prepared themselves for a hearing of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale Suitein workshop with James Cavanagh. Each of the three concerts I was able to attend was hallmarked by lively and sometimes riotous exchanges of ideas between Kuusisto and his collaborators.

The sardonic songs with Kähärä blended extempore spontaneity with studio gloss, Bach's sonata with Tuite amicably combined rusticity and refinement, and Piazzolla's Libertangowith Dunne and McGonnell wound the festival up to an uninhibited conclusion.

ANDREW JOHNSTONE

Barainsky, RTÉ NSO/de Ridder

NCH, Dublin

Messiaen Les offrandes ounewsbliées; Gerald Barry La Plus Forte; Beethoven Symphony No 4.

There are ways in which Gerald Barry's one-act opera, La Plus Forte (The Stronger), a setting of Strindberg's play, seems like a postscript to the composer's earlier The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Both pieces are all-female operas. They both have a character in a key role who neither sings nor speaks. In the case of the La Plus Forte, that leaves just one character who actually sings. And they both have a protagonist who has built a relationship - a lesbian affair in one case, marriage in the other - on what turns out to have been an illusion.

In La Plus Forte, Madame X encounters Mademoiselle Y in a café on Christmas Eve, and learns - from her companion's unspoken responses to her own, nervous, silence-filling talk - that her husband has had an affair, and Mademoiselle Y was in fact his mistress. The wife concludes that, when all is said and done, she is the stronger.

Musically, there are echoes of Petrain some of the gestures of La Plus Forte. But the one- act opera is overall calmer, at times even neo-classically collected in emotion, but with a quietness can be tinged with nightmare.

The effect here was to make the moments of raw hysteria and the catapulting virtuosity of the extraordinarily agile German soprano Claudia Barainsky all the more telling.

La Plus Fortewas written for a national broadcaster (Radio France) not an opera company. It will be interesting to see how the challenge of getting this strange, roughly 20-minute slice of life on stage will ever be met.

André de Ridder conducted it with both reflectiveness and impact. He conducted Messiaen's first published orchestral work, Les offrandes oubliées, with the sometimes shocking fire of a young man, and captured well the intense evocative serenity of the opening and closing sections.

Beethoven's Fourth Symphony responded less well to his light and dark approach, with simply too much detail getting lost in the pursuit of a boisterous and rather rough-edged enthusiasm.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Himself and Nora

Mill Theatre, Dundrum

Behind every great man, reasons this remarkably anodyne musical by Sheila Walsh (book and lyrics) and Jonathan Brielle (music and lyrics), there is a great woman. With James Joyce and Nora Barnacle's relationship thus illuminated, why shouldn't the complexity of their lives, their exile, or their place in literature be shoehorned into a series of show tunes and enshrined by Broadway boilerplate? Forsaking the more compelling idiosyncrasies of love and genius, though, this show - first staged in California, now presented in the Mill Theatre as a "musical reading" - comes a cropper between two sharply opposed impulses: to celebrate the staggering innovation of its hero within the grating reductiveness of its medium.

So it is that we witness James (in Matt Bogart's toothsome portrait of the artist as a young belter) coached by his loving Da in the ways of religious distemper and wordplay. Any complexity in his courtship of Nora (Kaitlin Hopkins) is similarly shrunken into kissing lessons and cutesy-coarse exchanges.

As we briskly chronicle his self-imposed exile, his penury, publishing travails and ill-health, character and plot are compacted into between-numbers sententiousness: "I won't kneel, I will write!" "If I stay, I'll never be the voice of Ireland!" "If only they'll lift the ban on Ulysses!" If that is a consequence of the simplifying idiom of the musical, which must parcel its information neatly between the verse and the chorus, it is nonetheless a shame that Breille's compositions stick so unswervingly to colourless templates.

A lyrically elliptical Touch, Kissattempts some formal departure, although the show slides mainly from Nora's supportive belters ( I Will Stand Fast) to trivial comic oompahs ( Let's Have a Drink) to Nora's less supportive belters ( Without a Man) and the unintentionally hilarious River Liffey.

That last one, stringing together a rhythmic litany of Irish place names, is intended as the stirring refrain of an exiled son of Ireland, but closer to home it sounds like a geography mnemonic. While there is some camp pleasure in hearing ersatz Irish accents rhapsodise the colour green, the show's misty-eyed reverie owes little to its hero and nothing excuses its unctuously twee ending. "Ire-land, my Ire-land," sings an aged Joyce, "home of the most perfect word: Love!" This is a literary genius reduced to the status of a greeting card inscription.