Irish Times writers peruse the latest offerings in the arts.
Wayne Shorter Quartet
National Concert Hall
Thursday night's performance of the Wayne Shorter Quartet at the National Concert Hall was part of Walton's World Masters Series. It was also, personally, a rare experience to hear four brilliant musicians playing adventurously on stage and to remain largely unmoved by their music.
And they are exceptional musicians. Shorter, confining himself mostly to tenor, with occasional forays on soprano, remains one of the front-rank jazzmen of the past 40 years. His much younger colleagues - Danilo Perez (piano), John Patitucci (bass) and Brian Blade (drums) - are players of the highest calibre in the music. And the quartet have gathered together for tours over the past few years, so their familiarity with each other is complete.
That familiarity was very evident in the music. Thematic material was sketched out quickly and virtually, if not wholly, dispensed with for the players to get on with the business of improvising, in the course of which their acute awareness of the ongoing dialogue and each one's place in it was impressive. Everything - line, harmony, time - was handled with the utmost freedom from constraint.
It gave rise to moments of great beauty, and there was little sense of any resort to the safety of a comfort zone. Frequently the piano-bass-drums functioned not so much as a rhythm section, but rather as a kind of deftly-woven aural carpet of constantly changing patterns, to which Shorter, playing in a generally sparse and laconic manner, contributed occasional splashes of colour. But to these ears it seemed the brief passages of arresting music were surrounded by much that was derived from the intellect, rather than the heart, often arbitrary in its shape and, again personally, curiously uninvolving.
A single encore, Shorter's own Footprints, was somehow symptomatic of the night's music. The theme, sparsely outlined, was rapidly disposed of and the quartet got down to a rather cursory examination of the material. It was a perfunctory gesture, and it was telling that the applause which followed was respectful, but hardly enough to encourage further encores.
There was also a sense to the concert that, in a different context, Perez, Patitucci and Blade would offer truly memorable music as a trio. Blade is already acknowledged as one of the great young drummers today, Perez is a beautiful pianist, while Patitucci showed himself to be an extraordinary bassist, his warmth and engagement (and, to be fair, Blade's, too) providing most of the best moments of what was, sadly, an ultimately disappointing evening.
Ray Comiskey
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The Drowned World
Project Cube
As darkly as it posits itself as a post-apocalyptic nightmare, there is something undeniably comic about the premise of this futuristic fable from the Welsh playwright Gary Owen. From the perspective of this world, in which physical beauty seems to determine success, Owen's world, in which even the remotely beautiful are routinely exterminated for the threat they pose to the plain-faced majority stirs wry amusement even as it sickens.
The play's motifs, as it performs its own take on the sci-fi genre, are pleasingly clever; the old chestnut of metamorphosis by radiation poisoning has been replaced by the phenomenon of infection by radiance - the sheen and lustre of healthy, youthful skin, which transforms the citizens, those callous ciphers of the regime, into the sociable, emotional types deemed non-citizens for the moral weakness their collapse into feeling denotes.
Unintentional as it seems, this humour could easily overwhelm the gravity of Owen's vision, but handled skilfully it can fuse warmth into the blanched lives he gathers onstage - Julian (Paul Reid) and Tara (Marian Araujo) of the doomed beauty, Darren (Matt Tormey), the depressed citizen who longs to be like them, and Kelly (Ruth McGill), the officer responsible for the policing of all three.
And the handling of Randolf SD, in only its third professional production, is both skilful and vibrant; engrossing performances from all four cast members and sure direction of their difficult dynamic by Wayne Jordan suggest that Project's support of this young company is yielding rich dividends.
Though it exhibits writing of real beauty at several points, and confidently weaves the viewer through meditations on matters from vanity to citizenship, from evil to integration, the play is by no means unflawed; structurally, it strains to hold together at several points, while thematically Owen is guilty of repetition and a deeply dubious resolution in some sort of wasteland afterworld.
But Jordan's tenacity, his instinct for rhythm and flow, ably carries his fine cast through. Louise White's uncluttered set, like the production as a whole more suggestive than insistent, and Sinead Wallace's lighting, add to its success.
Runs until March 12th
Belinda McKeon
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d'Arcy, RTÉ NSO/Pearce
NCH, Dublin
Bach/Webern - Ricercar from The Musical Offering
Siobhán Cleary - Threads
Xenakis - Pithoprakta
Scelsi - Anahit
Siobhán Cleary - Alchemy
This year's RTÉ Horizons series of lunchtime orchestral concerts by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra began last Tuesday. The programmes are assembled in consultation with a featured Irish composer, who for this concert was Siobhán Cleary.
The two orchestral works by Cleary had many interests in common with the three 20th-century pieces surrounding them. The placing of the aptly named Threads (1992-4) immediately after Webern's extraordinary transcription of the six-part Ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering, emphasised the historical aspects of Cleary's techniques - concentrated, overlapping, linear ideas of rhythm and melody that owe something to renaissance and baroque counterpoint.
The dense textures in the second section of Threads, and in some parts of Cleary's Alchemy (2001) were also reflected in Xenakis's Pithoprakta, though that classic of 1950s stochastic techniques does not embrace all the areas that Threads and Alchemy inhabit.
For example, Alchemy's four sections progress partly through precisely calculated changes of density and colour. So it was appropriate that one of Cleary's choices for this concert was Scelsi's Anahit - a magical exploration of sonorous possibilities via an unusual grouping of just 18 instruments, plus a scordatura-tuned solo violin, the latter sensitively played by Michael d'Arcy.
With Colman Pearce conducting, the RTÉ NSO's playing in this pleasing programme was variable. Ensemble was scrappy in the Bach/Webern, which demands as much of the musicians' listening as of their playing. Pithoprakta was just not disciplined enough.
However, Cleary's pieces came across with authority, and Anahit was a treat.
Series continues on at 1.05 next Tuesday, with the RTÉ NSO, conducted by David Brophy, in music by Frank Corcoran and Lutoslawski. Free admission. For details telephone 01- 4170000 or visit www.nch.ie
Martin Adams
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The Threepenny Opera
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
It is surprising that it has taken so long for Bruiser Theatre Company to tackle Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera, given that its expressionist, agit-prop genre is ideally suited to the Belfast company's trademark style and that director Lisa May herself played the role of Mrs Peacham some years ago.
In her usual inquisitive, explorative fashion, May has filleted every vowel and consonant of Brecht's biting text, staying true to its word, if not entirely its spirit. That is left to musical director Brian Connor's keyboard arrangements of Weill's gloriously louche ballads, which inspire the six-strong cast to come close to the satirical decadence and social and political commentary somewhat lacking in the spoken passages.
While the setting is now the brothels and back streets of London's Soho, the corrupt sleaze of the Weimar Republic remains, notionally, close at hand. But this neat, monochromed presentation, with the actors clad in variations of spotless white T-shirts, black trousers and braces, comes across as strangely sanitised.
For sure, there is plenty of three-dimensional colour in Brecht's wonderful gallery of dubious characters, but in leaving so much to the imagination, there is a tendency to mime every nuance and personality tic, which - in a production stretching to a little under three hours - entails hard graft for cast and audience.
Derek Halligan is a wheedling Beggar King, Niki Doherty a pert Lucy, Claire Cogan a grimacing Mrs Peacham and Sharon Morwood an arch Polly. But it is Tony Flynn's transvestite tart Jenny and Michael Condron's razor-sharp Macheath, who cut right to the quick, delivering both the swaggering military camp of The Cannon Song and the brutal tenderness of The Pimp's Ballad with memorable panache and danger.
At the Old Museum until March 5th, then touring to Derry, Antrim, Coleraine, Lisburn, Downpatrick, Armagh, Kilkenny, Drogheda, Limerick, Dublin (The Helix) and Enniskillen
Jane Coyle
