Reviews

Irish Times writers review Van Morrison at the Ulster Hall in Belfast and NCC/Edwards at St Mary's Church in Navan.

Van Morrison

Ulster Hall Belfast

Paul McNamee

Will someone please tell Van Morrison to shut up. For two hours on Wednesday, he just wouldn't stop gabbing.

He spoke to the audience (at least twice), he fluffed a line . . . and laughed, and he was so emboldened by the gig that he rushed his band on for an unscheduled second encore. "Someone's just slipped him an E," a fan muttered about rock's most famous stoney-faced curmudgeon.

The show was arranged as the Ulster Hall, one of Belfast's best and oldest concert Halls, is about to be renovated, the chipped Victorian interior to be changed forever. Morrison, it appears, wanted one final dance with the old lady of Bedford Street.

Drawing mostly from albums recorded over the last 10 years - especially Back On Top and The Healing Game - it had a swing and a verve that Morrison shows don't always hit. A few standards - a faithful Jackie Wilson Said, a swing-laced Have I Told You Lately - were peppered among some old-school blues classics. The shuddering take on St James Infirmary had Morrison doing his best Cab Calloway, his band sounding as though they were shuffling through a Harlem funeral.

It was an early highlight.

Then somewhere, maybe during the strident cover of That's Life, this became more than just another gig for Morrison. Burning Ground saw him morph into soul-shouting preacher, plaintively bringing a lover back home.

It moved him up several gears.

But it was his incredible reading of the 25-year-old And The Healing Has Begun that sealed the deal. As Morrison sucked and blew his harmonica like a man trying to save his mortal soul, he started to reference Madame George, the paean to Belfast from Astral Weeks. "On the backstreets/that's where I'm from", he started to chant. It was a remarkable moment.

There was a valedictory feel to the whole evening and it wasn't just because a concert hall was getting a new lick of paint. Morrison hits 60 this year and maybe that milestone has caused some reflection, maybe even giving the man cause to smile.

NCC/Edwards

St Mary's Church, Navan

Martin Adams

With its excellent acoustic and architecture of beautiful simplicity, St Mary's (Church of Ireland) in Navan is an excellent venue for music-making. The National Chamber Choir sang there on Wednesday night, for the second concert in their spring tour.

The tour will end with two concerts in the Al Bustan Festival, Beirut, in early March; and its programme is a strongly designed sequence of music written over the last 850 years to Marian texts. The conductor for the Irish concerts is London-born Terry Edwards - a choral director of vast and versatile experience, most famously with his group London Voices.

Terry Edwards is one of those conductors who seems to do very little but does a lot. Even in such demanding music as Jürg Baur's Die Blume des Scharon (1979), the members of the NCC seemed relaxed and confident. Edwards knew exactly what he wanted; but the singers did it themselves.

That assurance was epitomised in the earthy expressivity of the five women, conductorless and on their own at the front of the church, who sang Hildegard von Bingen's O clarissima mater.

Wide differences of compositional style were addressed by taking each piece at face value and doing it for all it was worth. For example, the differences between Palestrina's eight-part Stabat mater and Verdi's 1888 setting of the Ave Maria were not pointed out via notions of how music of those times should be performed; they were just there. That is the best sort of authenticity.

Highlights of the concert included the works presented with the choir split into two groups at either end of the building.

The best of these was John Tavener's Hymn to the Mother of God, where the choir, in full voice, created a thrilling sensation of dense surround-sound.

Tours to Dublin on Sunday, Ballinakill on Monday, Derry on Tuesday and Ramelton, Co Donegal, on Wednesday. For details call (01) 7007811 or visit www.nationalchamberchoir.dcu.ie.