Tony Clayton-Lea was in Dundalk to hear Ron Sexsmith in impressive form, while Edward Power headed to the Blackfort Arts Gallery to witness the Holy Ghost Fathers in action.
Ron Sexsmith, Spirit Store, Dundalk
It isn't often that a relatively unknown support act can grab the attention from the get-go, but New York-bred, Nashville-
resident David Mead managed to do just that within minutes of the first song. Crystal-clear guitar sound and a handful of tautly expressive songs cut across the burble of voices; before you knew it, the audience was eating out of his hand, buying him pints and taking him home.
Of course, for the past few years Irish audiences have been doing precisely the same to Canadian singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith, and it's a measure of the man's specific humility that he can take the adulation in his stride. He still hasn't crossed over into mainstream success, despite pressure from all sides of the music industry divide and batches of songs that far outweigh many of his acoustic guitar-toting contemporaries. But rather than point to this as a failing on his part (which seems to be all pervasive; if he's successful on his own terms, can't we just leave it at that?), we should perhaps be grateful that Sexsmith has made a decision to write material that gets better and better. A new song, I've Seen Tomorrow In Her Eyes, was awkwardly débuted; it was gorgeous - plain and simple.
Yet it was material from his concise back catalogue that drew the most rewarding of responses. Notably stripped back and unplugged (guitar, keyboard, a bunch of flowers and that's your lot), Sexsmith didn't put a foot wrong: These Days, Strawberry Blonde, Gold In Them Hills, Foolproof, Former Glory, Cheap Hotel, Disappearing Act and others were played with little or no fuss. It was the type of performance - equal parts loose and intense - that made you selfishly wish he would never gain mainstream acceptance. Or that, if he did, he would always remember to occasionally return to the venues where the magic was first generated.
Ron Sexsmith is at St Nicholas's Church (Galway Art Festival) tomorrow, then tours nationwide. - Tony Clayton-Lea
NCC/Creed, National Gallery, Dublin
Two Psalms - Sweelinck, Komm , Jesu, komm BWV229 - Bach, Fünf Gesänge Op 104 - Brahms, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen - Mahler/
Gottwald, Die Blume des Scharon - Jürg Baur
The English conductor Marcus Creed, who made his début here with the National Chamber Choir, has been living and working in Germany since 1976. He's been most closely associated with the RIAS Chamber Choir in Berlin, of which he became artistic director in 1987.
He's worked in both early and new music (he conducted on the Berlin Philharmonic's recording of Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras with Claudio Abbado and Friedrich Goldmann), and since 1998 he's been professor of choral conducting at the Musikhochschule in Köln. In January, he became chief conductor of the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart.
This programme was part of the choir's Travels in Europe series, with Creed taking responsibility for The Netherlands (Sweelinck's French settings of Psalms 1 and 100) and Germany (pieces by Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Jürg Baur).
His style in the early pieces seemed warmer and less chiselled than might have been offered by the choir's artistic director Celso Antunes.
The Sweelinck came off more successful than the Bach, where individual lines in the double-choir motet, Komm, Jesu, komm, showed some signs of strain.
The harmonic glow of the five songs of Brahms's Op. 104 was well caught, and German conductor Clytus Gottwald's arrangement of Mahler's Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen was a spectacular choral tour-de-force. Creed and his singers fully matched Gottwald's chutzpah in bringing off such an unlikely-seeming arrangement.
Jürg Baur's Die Blume des Scharon, written in 1979, is a stylistically eclectic work that sets texts from the Song of Songs with a tight focus on expressive outcome. It's the sort of music that not so long ago the NCC gave wide berth to. Here, Creed directed a confident and purposeful performance that was utterly persuasive. - Michael Dervan
Goner. An Grianán, Letterkenny
Brian Parks's Goner lands on the Donegal stage with impeccable Fringe credentials. Presented by New York-based Absurdum Productions, it boasts key players (most notably director John Clancy) from previously acclaimed imports Horse Country and The Complete Lost Works Of Samuel Beckett, and bagged a Fringe First and rave reviews aplenty at last year's Edinburgh festival; so far, so promising. To call Goner a black comedy would be understating matters more than just a tad; an episode of TV sitcom Scrubs, directed by Dr Strangelove-
period Stanley Kubrick, might be closer to the mark. This is a short, sharp slice of the type of merciless liberal satire that current US theatre seems effortlessly able to create these days, the kind of taboo-mauling assault on social mores that appears to remain beyond our own ageing satirical contingent.
Here, a Dubya-esque US president (Bill Coelius) lands in an anarchic ER room after an assassination attempt puts a bullet in his brain - cue intermittent hilarity at the expense of, well, pretty much every sacred cow imaginable.
Ultimately, Goner feels somewhat slight, and not just because of its brief running time (just over an hour); heaping one nifty one-liner upon another is absolutely fine, it just doesn't necessarily add up to a particularly memorable night at the theatre. What doesn't fail to impress, however, is the pitch-perfect ensemble playing, notably David Calvitto as the casually-insane head doctor and Jody Lambert as a lovelorn intern. Worth the visit, however. - Derek O'Connor
Holy Ghost Fathers. Blackfort Arts Gallery
Life in an avant garde rock band can't be easy. Not only are you required to play loud, distorted music in an abstract and dispassionate manner but it is mandatory that you do so while looking profoundly harrowed, as if poring over advanced calculus or performing key-hole surgery, rather than wrenching power-chords from a beaten-up guitar.
Although Holy Ghost Fathers' cerebral grunge is a touch rough-hewn, the Dublin outfit are certainly solemn enough to cut it as avant-rockers of the first rank. Few gigs offer a better chance to appear deeply tortured than a show in a Temple Bar gallery and the Holy Ghosts seized the opportunity; furrowing brows and pulling grimaces like their careers depended on it.
Happily, there is more to the group than impressive sulks. While room for improvement remains, there is much to admire in their music, a frazzled assault pitched somewhere between Sonic Youth at their most throwaway and Fugazi's populist throb-rock. Their pretentious airs certainly didn't dissuade a sizeable audience from cramming in to hear them romp through the recently released Cock of the Walk album, adored by many critics but unjustly overlooked by the public.
Opener Angelus Bell was a vitriolic mood piece, swinging between sinuous fretwork and pile-driving bass lines; Cock of the Walk touted fiery industrial pop with a to-die-for guitar hook; a visceral 9V Battery culminated in a riot of rhythmic power chords and snarled vocals.
Holy Ghost Fathers are performers of immense potential with an enormously bright future, but don't expect to see them smiling about it just yet. - Edward Power
