Reviews

Today The Irish Times reviews Little Victories, the Ulster Orchestra and Majella Cullagh

Little Victories Watergate, Kilkenny

Barnstorm Theatre Company has carved out a notable niche in theatre for children which is at once educational and enjoyable. The education focuses on human relationships and concerns, and the company's new play, Little Victories by Shaun Prendergast, is a delightful exploration of both.

Summarised, the story might not seem entirely apposite for children. It is centred on seven-year-old Tony, whose father is dead, and whose mother, still in her twenties, has had new boyfriends. She is pregnant by the latest one, and they plan to marry. Tony has met and become friends with a girl, Josie, who has cancer. They play and fight, Josie's illness takes over and she dies.

Not exactly a barrel of laughs? Wrong; it is funny, touching and true from start to finish. The secret is in the central character of Tony, a likeable extrovert who bounces back from his tribulations. His are the little victories that enable him to survive, to adapt to changes with acceptance or defiance, and to roll with life's punches. In him the author has created a real person who touches nerves and funny-bones, easy to empathise with.

Stephen Kelly, a young actor who, in vocal and physical mannerisms, rolls back his years to the required age-group, is the perfect interpreter for Tony. With that critical element right, the others fall happily into place. Dorothy Cotter is quirky and spirited as Josie, Noni Stapleton is the mother and Brian Thunder the gormless boyfriend and husband. Together they fashion a work that, while aimed at eight to 13-year-olds, has relevance and entertainment for older age groups, not excluding adults.

Director Veronica Coburn, herself a force in creative children's theatre, makes her impressive skills felt here. She deploys masks, puppetry and fantasy in a production which understands what the suspension of disbelief is all about. Barnstorm has done it again, with bells on. - Gerry Colgan

On tour at various venues until May 20th

Ulster Orchestra/Dmitri Sitkovetsky Ulster Hall, Belfast

Lieutenant Kijé SuiteProkofiev

Songs and Dances of Death

Mussorgsky (orch. Shostakovich)

Man-o'-WarIan Wilson

Symphony No 4 in D minorSchumann

Ian Wilson's Man-o'-War was commissioned by the BBC for the 2001 Proms season and was first performed there by the Ulster Orchestra under Dmitri Sitkovetsky. This was its first performance in Belfast. The title has inspired Wilson to create a Varèse-like sonic landscape of threatening brass, shrill wind interjections and tense sustained notes on the strings. This Man-o'-War nevertheless seemed a playful monster in its earlier stages, but in the later sections the music acquired a real emotional charge.

Russians refer to Death as "she", and when Mussorgsky's cycle was last performed here (also in Shostakovich's orchestration), the solo part was taken by a female singer. But there is a lot to be said for having a male singer, especially when Sergei Alexashkin has both the classic dark Russian bass and an ability to get to the heart of the music and the words. Death's cooing lullaby in the opening song was especially memorable.

Sitkovetsky found himself more at home in the dark sonorities of the Wilson piece and of Shostakovich's orchestration of the Mussorgsky than in the Prokofiev, where the last movement, which can seem inconsequential, came off best.

But if the Romance movement of the Prokofiev was frankly glum, there was charm in the corresponding "Romanze" of Schumann's Fourth Symphony. The first movement, and its slow introduction especially, was performed with particular sympathy and insight. - Dermot Gault

Majella Cullagh, NSO/Colman Pearce NCH, Dublin

Chantefleurs et Chantefables

Lutoslawski

Symphony No 3James Wilson

The latest of the NSO's "Horizons" concerts saw the première on Tuesday of a new symphony, his third, by James Wilson, who turned 80 last year.

Wilson has been more prolific as an opera composer and writer of concertos than as a symphonist, and his Third Symphony, which was completed two years ago, came all of 26 years after his second.

The piece is cast in the conventional four movements, but doesn't have anything of the feel of traditional symphonic writing. There's a musing quality to it, creating almost the effect of a stream of consciousness.

Rhythmic patterns and musical gestures which on the page look pointed and purposeful often actually sounded as if left hanging in the air, connecting at best obliquely with what followed.

The long second movement, an Andante, sets out as a single violin line which accumulates contrapuntally after a series of peremptory interruptions to reach a 13-part density. At times it's like a convoluted, nocturnal pastoral, with a bow or two to Tippett. Here, it shared a quality with the piece as a whole, the very strange effect being that its important expressive features stayed frustratingly out of focus.

Part of this was undoubtedly due to the none-too-focused reading it got from conductor Colman Pearce, whose musical points seemed well-aimed in a very general rather than a specific way.

The approach also affected Lutoslawski's Chantefleurs et Chantefables of 1991, nine intriguingly aerated settings of "poems for wise children" by Robert Desno. Soprano Majella Cullagh sang them with a confident directness which quite ignored the wonderful fantasy of Lutoslawski's delicate creations. - Michael Dervan