Reviews

Laurence Mackinreviews Bryan Ferry at Vicar Street in Dublin  Michael Dervanreviews Best, RTÉ NSO/Markson NCH, Dublin

Bryan Ferry,
Vicar Street, Dublin

Bryan Ferry's music swaggers and pouts, it flirts and smokes cigarettes with all the nonchalance of a Parisian. The support act kicked things off in this style. Barefoot, or Sam Obernik to her friends, is a classy act, and sounds as good as she looks, in her chic black dress - her vocal range is throaty and luscious, and she enjoys pushing her range all over the scale.

All this was largely forgotten when Ferry strode on to the stage, to the lusty strains of The In Crowd. Looking immaculate in a black suit and tie ensemble (which will no doubt do wonders for Marks and Spencer's sales), he held centre stage and led his polished band with authority.

Ferry is on tour promoting Dylanesque, his new album of Bob Dylan songs. Live, the tracks are something of a disappointment. Ferry's versions are pristine and bland and although the music and lyrics, in their original form, are raw and sharp, Ferry has polished them with his art-pop sensibilities, and dulled their blades in the process. Knocking on Heaven's Door, The Times They Are a-Changin', Gates of Eden and All Along the Watchtower all sound like solid covers; but Ferry's knack for taking other people's songs and making them his own seems to have slipped a little. Ferry says he is trying to give the Dylan songs a different feel, with less raw intensity and more exuberance. The results here were largely uninspiring.

However, when he rolls into his own classics, the room and the band visibly lift. Jealous Guy might be a cover, but, unlike the Dylan tracks, Ferry inhabits it completely. It sways and soars, finishing powerfully, thanks in no small part to soaring vocal solos from Me'sha Bryan and Sarah Brown, and Ferry's quality shines through. Love is the Drug gives the set a shot in the arm and Let's Stick Together blisters through the venue, with all the hook and posture that make Ferry's version such a joy to hear.

Ferry can still draw on the style that made him such an effortlessly cool icon, but the Dylan tracks here wouldn't have sounded out of place coming from the speakers in Marks and Spencer.

Laurence Mackin

Best, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin

Wagner - Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Prelude and Finale. Mahler - Symphony No 7
Mahler's Seventh Symphony was the occasion of some sword-crossing between the 74-year-old Arnold Schoenberg and the music critic of the New York Times, Olin Downes, in 1948.

For Downes, Mahler's Seventh was "detestably bad music". Schoenberg, who had been into his 30s before he came to appreciate Mahler's music, thought differently. "One who is able to study a score," he wrote to Downes, "need not depend on his personal taste. He would see all those strokes of genius, which never are to be found in lesser masters. He would discover them on every page of this work, in every measure, in every succession of tones and harmonies." Nearly 60 years on from this controversy, and more than a century after the work's composition, the symphony remains a problematic piece, the least popular and least often performed of Mahler's symphonies.

The work's most recent Irish performances, from the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst in 2004 and the Ulster Orchestra under Yoel Levi in 2000, paired it with modernist masterpieces, Debussy's Jeux and Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces.

On Friday, in his ongoing Mahler cycle with the RTÉ NSO, Gerhard Markson took a different approach. He offered the Prelude and Finale of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, a gesture explained perhaps by a shared affinity between the distinctive C major ceremonial of the opera and certain moments in the symphony's finale.

However, the general tenor of Markson's approach was to emphasise the symphony's character in marking what Mahler biographer Henri-Louis de la Grange has called "the furthest point to which Mahler advanced on the road to musical modernism".

It is an approach which makes the work's challenging outer movements sound extremely long, the first often seeming on the brink of getting to the point but never quite making it. Markson's Mahler often seems more focused on a kind of surgical precision than on expressive warmth. And the feeling that the music was being prevented from unwinding was certainly a limitation on this performance.

Markson's Wagner, by comparison, breathed more freely and surged more easily, and bass Matthew Best was resoundingly firm in Die Meistersinger's closing stance on German art and values.

Michael Dervan