Irish Times writers were at three recent concerts in Dublin:
Tinney, RTÉ NSO/Maloney
NCH, Dublin
Kevin O'Connell - Four Orchestral Pieces. Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 2. Mussorgsky/Ravel - Pictures at an Exhibition.
The Derry-born composer Kevin O'Connell, who turns 50 next year, has always been his own man. His latest orchestral work, an RTÉ commission premièred at the National Concert Hall on Friday, is very much an independent-minded piece or, rather, a set of four pieces.
O'Connell is happy to accept unexpected associations. He's anything but a minimalist, yet what the pulsing start of the first piece, Vestiges might seem to suggest is a minimalist journey.
What it actually offered was more on the lines of a flute tune with varied passing fancies, including some undermining of the minimalist suggestiveness.
Slattar, which followed, took off with an uneven galumphing which is distantly related to Norwegian folk music.
Conductor Gavin Maloney's modernist approach to the writing seemed to work best in the first two pieces, rather than in the third, Tubilustrium, (a memorial for fellow-composer Minna Keal), or the last, Prelude with Carillon, a scherzo, which O'Connell regards as "one of the toughest tests for a composer".
Maloney strode fearlessly through the big tunes of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto and soloist Hugh Tinney brought many touches of observant individuality to the florid patterns of the piano writing.
The two men did not always agree on the detail of rubato, and Tinney's handling of the slow movement was cool enough to ensure no hearts would melt. But the music-making lacked nothing in spirit at the other end of the scale, there was plenty of excitement on offer and the audience was delighted.
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a memorial to his painter friend Victor Hartmann, was first brought to wide public attention through Ravel's 1922 orchestration. The piano original had a difficult time through bowdlerised editions turning some of the composer's intentions on their head, and the Ravel orchestration still rather suffers from being treated as an orchestral showpiece.
Maloney's account was vivid but rather on the crude side, and not always well-disciplined in execution. His approach tended to downplay the French flavour contributed by the fastidious Ravel in favour of an altogether more garish finish. - Michael Dervan
John Cale
The Village, Dublin
Gone but not forgotten: the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that marked John Cale out as a musician with a soaring imagination. Hammocked by his band this time round, having played some spellbinding solo shows in Dublin in recent years, Cale's music was reduced to little more than a dilutant, a far cry from the 100 per cent proof he has brewed solo for years.
An expectant crowd huddled near the stage, all the better to grasp every note, to scramble for every Caleian insight into life's sweet tragedy. Instead what they got was appalling sound, workmanlike arrangements and a roadie who trained his torch on anyone bold enough to deign to take the great man's picture.
Cale's Welsh baritone can silence a room, but bathed in pedestrian accompaniment, it rarely navigated the cavernous depths to which we've become deliciously accustomed over the years. Helen Of Troy, usually a muscular Cale calling-card, struggled for air amid grinding bass lines and, much as the percussion railed to levitate it past ground level, Cale hammered it back into its subterranean habitat with his unrelentingly mechanical delivery.
Hushmanaged to conjure some of Cale's best baroque instincts and Big White Cloudoffered the first decent glimpse of those velveteen vocals in full swing. Only on Walking The Dogdid the band earn its keep in earnest, pumping Cale with the musical creatine he lacked himself.
Ultimately though, this was a perfunctory performance that bore none of the dissonance that has marked Cale apart for four decades. His bold declamatory style was buried beneath a shapeless morass of sound; his chilling on-stage presence diluted by an attitude that betrayed at best boredom, and at worst disdain for his adoring audience.
Will the real John Cale please come back? - Siobhán Long
Opera Gala
National Concert Hall
Saturday's opera concert at the NCH was an event notable for strong musical values. Paolo Gavanelli, making his fifth appearance here in as many years, is today's essential Verdi baritone, and it was Verdi characters that dominated his programme.
He excelled in arias from Nabucco, Macbeth, I due Foscari, Luisa Millerand Rigolettoas well as in extended duets from La Traviataand Simon Boccanegra, in the last of which his ravishing crescendo and diminuendo on the word figliawas alone worth the admission price. He also delivered a nobly declaimed account of Gerard's jealous outburst from Andrea Chénierand ended with his popular bravura act as Rossini's Figaro.
Six of the Verdi characters he portrayed were operatic fathers experiencing a gamut of emotions, all of them credibly put across by the artist's Gobbi- like command of expansive line, dynamic shading and vocal colouring. Although lean in texture, the voice is always focused in delivery and rock- steady throughout a wide range.
In the Germont/Violetta confrontation and the moving father/daughter reunion scene from Boccanegra, he was partnered by Mairéad Buicke.
As yet, the young Limerick soprano cannot match the nuanced phrasing and dynamic shading of the vastly more experienced baritone, but she more than held her own both musically and dramatically in the two Verdi father/daughter episodes as well as in other daughter arias by Catalani and Puccini.
There were some blemishes; she eschewed the trills in Marguerite's jewel song and, more worryingly, frequently hit sustained high notes fractionally short of centre; not, though, in her dazzling and utterly seductive rendering of Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heissfrom Lehár's Giuditta.
Conductor Colman Pearce supported his singers strongly throughout and led the RTÉCO in adroitly paced and rhythmically sprung overtures and dances by Rossini, Smetana and Massenet. - John Allen
