Reviews

Irish Times critics review Emma Kirkby and the Irish Baroque Orchestra at the Kings Inns, To The Dogs at the Project and  Simon Preston at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin

Emma Kirkby, IBO/van Dael
King's Inns, Dublin

Corelli - Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 7
Handel - Armida abbandonata
Charpentier - Incidental music to Circé
Purcell - The Fairy Queen (exc)

English soprano Emma Kirkby - long-time leading light of the period performance movement - was one of two special guests appearing with the Irish Baroque Orchestra at its concert in the King's Inns.

The voice, occasionally dismissed by unbelievers as "white" or "boyish", is a little fuller and a little richer than it was during Kirkby's initial, sudden prominence in the 1970s and moving into the 1980s. But there remains the same beguiling blend of vocal purity and technical agility that she deployed with the appearance of utter ease in the Handel cantata Armida abbandonata, really a self-contained mini-opera originally for private, drawing-room performance. Containing recitatives and songs, the piece concluded with a lilting siciliano lament, whose repeats she gracefully and effortlessly decorated.

Directing the orchestra was the second special guest, Dutch Baroque violinist Lucy van Dael, in the latest in a series of highly successful collaborations between the IBO and distinguished directors such as Andrew Manze, Paul Goodwin and Monica Huggett. In instrumental music by Corelli and Charpentier the ensemble was tight and clean, the players producing a searing but flexible quality in responsive unanimity with van Dael. Violinist Claire Duff was a fine partner in the Corelli, whether echoing van Dael's line or weaving contrapuntally around it.

The evening was crowned by a set of extracts from the semi-opera The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell, one of the composers with whom Kirkby is most closely associated. The opening line set a tone of delectable grieving: "If Love's a Sweet Passion, why does it torment?"

Kirkby's voice was at once hugely expressive and yet direct and unfussy, making this a performance that transcended mere entertainment and aspired to the Baroque ideal of moving the affections.

Michael Dungan

To The Dogs
Project Cube, Dublin

Our explorers glide into Project Cube on small folding bicycles, as though they have been swept into performance by the sheer momentum of the day's discoveries. The two members of England's Lone Twin have spent the day tracing the north of the city, before back-pedalling, clipboards in hand, to report their findings.

As an amplified MP3 player blares out Willie Nelson's On The Road Again, Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters dismount to raise a toast. "To the parts of our bodies that already hurt us," bellows the stentorian Whelan. "To the parts of the city that already hurt us!" It's tempting to take the bait. During a single day in Dublin, we hear, they have immersed themselves in James Joyce and Samantha Mumba.

Thus their nippy contemporary travelogue might be considered Ulysses on wheels or, perhaps, 2004: A Place Odyssey.

In fact, their deceptively artless and freewheeling performance - absorbing and amusing as it is - has little to do with urban specifics.

Road workers smile at them ("The man said he was digging for money. We didn't know if he meant buried treasure or his wages."); children throw stones at them; a traffic warden physically stops Winters with near-philosophical insight: "You're not a car." Still, this could be Rotterdam or anywhere; Liverpool or Rome.

If certain characters sound too ridiculous or too conveniently poignant to be true (a driver singing along to Michael Bolton; a lonely Australian waiter), then they probably are.

And although their salon-fresh Chuck Norris looks and almost parodic assemblage of cycling accoutrements should be a reminder, it's easy to forget that Lone Twin are performers.

Like all artifice, the details of these 30 minutes may not be true, but they do feel true.

As all cities grow dense and chaotic, and their people more unknowable, Lone Twin find treasure in the pause of traffic lights and offer snapshots of the intersection.

They raise a toast: "To what's going on."

Peter Crawley

Simon Preston (organ)
St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin

S.S. Wesley - Choral Song and Fugue
Bach - Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543
Schumann - Four Sketches
Mendelssohn, arr Best - St Paul Overture
Elgar - Sonata No 1
Stanford - Postlude Op 101

George Hewson was among the last practitioners of a 19th-century art in organ playing - bringing orchestral music to the public through transcriptions. Such transcriptions were prominent in the recitals he gave between 1920 and 1960, when he was organist of St Patrick's Cathedral. So it was appropriate that Simon Preston should include a fine example of that repertoire, W.T. Best's version of Mendelssohn's St Paul Overture, in his George Hewson Memorial Recital at St Patrick's. The programme was shaped around associations with Hewson, with the fine 1902 Willis organ, and with the musical aesthetics for which it was designed. Because of the organ's unfortunate placing in a chamber on the north side of the choir, it cannot speak directly into the building, and can seem remote. It is thus all the more to the credit of the original builder, to those who maintain the organ now and to Preston that the sound had such presence, and that each piece communicated so vividly.

Preston deserves his reputation in the world's top rank of organists. The use of colour was appropriate and, in Schumann's Four Sketches it was astonishing.

Although Bach's Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543 was not quite as clear-textured as S.S. Wesley's Choral Song and Fugue, that is partly because the instrument was not designed primarily for Baroque music.

The strengths of this recital were epitomised by Preston's ability to handle the unusual complexity of Elgar's Sonata No 1.

This large work, of almost symphonic proportions, can easily ramble.On this occasion it was cogent and extraordinarily powerful.

That was achieved by a deep understanding of the rhythmic sweep in Elgar's phrasing, and by managing the organ's colours and volume to serve a large vision.

Martin Adams