Reviews

Irish Times writers review classical concerts by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra and Estonian composer Arvo Part, a new play at the Cube theatre and a concert by Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys at the Olympia Theatre.

Gringolts, RTÉ NSO/Kok

NCH, Dublin

On the Waterfront Suite - Bernstein. Violin Concerto - Sibelius.

Symphony No 3. - Prokofiev.

Security and neatness were in evidence when the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Nicholas Kok.

Reliability in demanding music made this a commendable concert, even though neither of the large works on the programme made the impact which they can.

It would be hard to beat the beauty of tone and subtlety of shaping which Ilya Gringolts brought to the solo part of Sibelius's Violin Concerto.

This young player is one of those rarities whose musicianship seems flawless, whose virtuosity is as unobtrusive and modest as his platform presence, and who seems incapable of doing anything vulgar.

However, the Sibelius is earthy music, and sounds best when pressed towards the edge.

By that standard, Gringolts's playing was too measured, too good-mannered.

Although the RTÉ NSO and Nicholas Kok did well in creating clean ensemble, there was a disparity between evident effort and the sound which reached the auditorium; and in that they were not helped by the National Concert Hall's acoustics, which cut dead the intensity of such bass-rich orchestral writing. Everything sounded too nice.

It was revealing that the evening's most complete performance came in the Sibelius works which Gringolts presented as encores.

While the scoring and ideas of Humoresques Nos. 4 and 5 are of the lighter kind, the music is extraordinarily subtle and sophisticated. It was perfect.

Bernstein's Symphonic Suite On the Waterfront was neat, but not hairy enough for music as gritty as the film from which it is derived.

And while a similar point could be made about the playing of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 3, which closed the concert, one could see that this flamboyant music deserves its reputation as one of the most important works from that composer's middle years.

Martin Adams

_________________________________________________________

Hatfield, Leonard, UO/Yuasa

Belfast Festival

Fratres. Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. Tabula rasa.If Bach had been a beekeeper. Collage on B-A-C-H. Festina Lente. Fratres - Arvo Pärt.

The Belfast Festival moved to Clonard Monastery in west Belfast for a concert of orchestral music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

As a young man Pärt moved quickly from neo-classical style to serialism and collage techniques - his Nekrolog of 1960 was Estonia's first 12-tone composition - before reaching an impasse with the Bach-imbued Credo of 1968.

Just one work, the Third Symphony of 1971 (which reaches beyond Bach, back to medieval music), now remains from the period 1968-76, after which a new Pärt emerged with the familiar, pared-back style for which he is now so famous.

The Ulster Orchestra's programme in the visually and acoustically atmospheric Redemptorist church was in the safe hands of Takuo Yuasa, with readings from Pärt by Colin Stark interspersed between the pieces.

Just a single work from the 1960s was on offer, the Collage on B-A-C-H which, with its struggle between quotations from Bach and marauding dissonance, highlights some of the internal conflicts the composer had yet to resolve.

That resolution involved a reduction of means. "I have discovered," said Pärt, "that it is enough if a single note is played beautifully.

This single note, the sense of peace or silence have a calming effect on me." And it also involved the development of a compositional technique, dubbed by Pärt his "tintinnabuli style," which can be every bit as severe in its predetermination as the serialism he had turned away from.

For the listener, however, in works such as the Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), Fratres (1977), included in two different versions from the 1990s), Festina lente (1988), and Summa (1991), the results are hauntingly-tinged, small-scale soundscapes. The double violin concerto, Tabula rasa of 1977 (with soloists Leslie Hatfield and Catherine

Leonard) runs for around 25 minutes. In the context of an all-Pärt evening it seemed for its length to be comparatively impoverished in musical material and gesture. The strangely-titled If Bach had been a beekeeper (1976), heard in the later revision for piano, wind and strings) is by Pärt's latter-day standards an exceptional piece, whimsically blending the music of Bach and the bees of the title. It successfully incorporates a diversity of surface that's all too rare in the composer's later music.

Michael Dervan

________________________________________________________

Traces

Project Cube

This 40-minute play reminded me of certain workshops for actors in which it was permitted to say whatever was in their heads, move as their spirits dictated and be gene rally intense and emotive.

This let it all hang out approach doubtless had benefits for the participants visiting unknown sides of themselves.

What was not required or present was an audience seeking entertainment.

Serena Brabazon, Kate Hannah Perry and Rachel Rath devised the piece as an exploration of the role of the individual in contemporary society.

They employ an artificial language that sounds lyrical and slow at times, but is more frequently an impassioned babble.

Thoughts are offered through it of mankind reduced to robots, of loss of individual identity and their own experiences of this and of recovery.

Returning to the workshop analogy, the authors also took the opportunity - using images from T.S. Eliot and Lorca that I failed to connect with - to explore the relationship between actor and theme through an improvisational approach to subject matter.

They also explored the effect of body movement on voice, and the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's research into vocal resonation.

The only difficulty I have with this enterprise is that it does not result in a finished performance.

The words, in this context, seem either artificial or incomprehensible, the movements pointless and the thoughts, when one can discern them, resonant of immaturity.

The stage should not take the audience into its confidence, as it were.

It is not there to be educated in the arcane mysteries of theatre's techniques, but to enjoy their end products.

Gerry Colgan

_________________________________________________________

Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys

Olympia, Dublin

Standing side-by-side in identical clothes, the Clinch Mountain Boys resemble a police line-up for the country music vice squad. Were you forced to identify somebody, the most conspicuous of their number is also the most humble. That's him officer, the neat gentleman in the black tuxedo. He's the living legend of bluegrass.

Dr Ralph Stanley, whose tuxedo shimmers with ruby-red sequins when it catches the light, asks if we are familiar with the Coen brothers' movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Curiously, when platinum-selling logic dictates that everyone here must have at least one copy, only half of the venue cheers.

Maybe the audience is uncomfortable. With 200 albums in 57 years Stanley's legend should be bigger than any multiplex. Or perhaps it's difficult to feel mighty lonesome on a sold-out tour.

Stanley's superb rendition of I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow followed by his astonishing a cappella performance of O Death make nonsense of such reticence.

In the latter, Stanley's 76-year-old uniquely weathered voice reasons with death to spare him. Almost unbearably poignant, it leaves the banjo virtuoso (although he plays only once) checking his watch for much of the remaining performance as though he has a rendezvous to keep.

Actually, this display of Virginian politeness is to ensure that his excellent trans-generational group don't run over time.

Intricately performed Appalachian songs of misery, mortality, adultery, murder, and the misery of being unjustly accused of murder while unable to provide an alibi owing to adultery, are imbued with respect and humour by the technical mastery and sand-dry wit of the band.

But for the culprit behind such traditional gems as Pass Me Not, Little Maggie, the audience-requested Rank Strangers and the blinding send-off Pretty Polly, once again you ask for the magnificent doctor in the house.

Peter Crawley