Mozart - Die Zauberflöte: Achim Freyer's production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte for Opera Ireland is a combination of Simpsons lurid and Alice in Wonderland odd.
Opera Ireland, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
Michael Dervan
There's a crooked house set (whose three solid walls help to support and carry the voices), costumes that look as if they might have come straight from a designer's drawings, complete with pen marks, and a number of supersize figures, some leggily extended, others creating an even more towering effect, like wire-frame giants in a street carnival.
Freyer, who's responsible for design as well as direction, presents the work with a strong sense of circus.
Characters fly in on ropes, there are gags with revolving doors, a table is magically conjured out of nowhere behind an unfolding tablecloth, there are lion costumes, silver-glitter water splashes, and even a cock gag with Papageno's lust that I suspect no family-oriented circus would allow.
The Tamino and Pamina of Bernard Richter and Ailish Tynan are presented with clownish, white-paint faces, their tragically asymmetrical, raised eyebrows permanently pencilled on.
The straggly, blue-haired Tynan looks like anything other than the object of a prince's affections, yet her singing conveys not only a beauty but also a depth and range of feeling that is otherwise denied to her. She holds the stage to herself with her singing.
Similarly, Richter suggests in music a nobility of care and concern quite at odds with the stock movements he is allocated.
This, then, is a treatment of Mozart's masonic fable that's happy to allow stage and score to move on disconnected planes.
And within the music itself, conductor David Brophy doesn't always connect fully with the singers or with the familiar spirit of the music. However, the playing he secures from the RTÉCO is impressively clear in purpose and sharp in definition.
The comic characters are given hyperactive rolls and turns, which Steffen Kubach's Papageno and Sandra Oman's Papagena bring off to good effect.
The larger-than-life serious presences, notably the colourfully imposing Sarastro of Valerian Ruminski, are soberly calm. And the baddies, including a rather wobbly-sounding Queen of the Night from Milagros Poblador, are clearly deserving of their fate.
The effective chorus includes one male member who, with yellow wig and white suit, looks so like a perversely dyed version of Michael Jackson one can't help wondering if the reference is intentional.
It's that kind of evening.
The Opera Ireland season continues until Saturday, 01-8721122.
Oliver, The Helix, Mahony Hall
Gerry Colgan
Lionel Bart's musical, based on the Dickens novel Oliver Twist, has been carolling gaily along since its birth in 1960, and there is little reason to suppose that its appeal has waned in the least since then.
It is faithfully adapted from a classic story, with a cast of immortal characters, is packed with delicious songs and offers every opportunity to fill the stage with lively choreographed numbers. No wonder revivals are so frequent.
That is not to say that a poor production cannot, as with any musical, neutralise its merits.
If the actors are poor, the singers tuneless and - above all - if the children are overwhelmed by the stage, it can, of course, disappoint.
None of these dismal possibilities is allowed breathing space in this joint venture by The Helix in association with the Cork Opera House.
From start to finish it has pace, authority and a plethora of winning talents.
The songs are hardly in need of a critical reprise here, but I will point to the beautiful Who Will Buy and Where is Love as examples of the lyrical, and to Oliver and It's a Fine Life as toe-tappers.
They are performed, as are their numerous companion pieces, in the most beguiling way, one following another in near-continuous sequence. Age has not muted their appeal.
A couple of the lead actors display nothing short of star quality. Rebecca Smith's Nancy and John O'Flynn's Fagan combine serious interpretation with vocal excellence to a level that would grace any stage.
Barry O'Connell's Oliver is a touching creation, with Pat Doherty's Mr Bumble and Luke Hayden's Bill Sykes also making their mark.
The small army of children is disciplined and tuneful.
Director and choreographer Bryan Flynn, musical director Dave O'Connor and Pat Murray with his monumental set design are all an integral part of a hugely entertaining show.
Runs to April 10th; then at Cork Opera House April 21st-May 1st
The Dream of a Summer Day, Civic Theatre, Tallaght
Gerry Colgan
Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece in 1850 and, effectively abandoned by his Irish father and Greek mother, was reared in Dublin by an aunt.
He was a lonely child, with an unusual love of ghost stories and the occult. In his late teens he went to London and Paris, before travelling on to Cincinnati, where he married.
Later, having left his sluttish wife, he went to Japan at the age of 40, and fell in love with its culture and people.
He is famous today for his writings about his new country, into which he was totally assimilated, marrying a samurai's daughter and changing his name to Koizumi Yakumo.
His wife told him ghost stories, and he wrote vividly about these, earning comparisons with writers such as Edgar Allan Poe.
At the relatively young age of 54, he died of a heart attack, ending a life that was, by any comparison, a remarkable one.
Liam Halligan, the new artistic director of Storytellers Theatre Company, has chosen this absorbing story for his first production.
The company's familiar style, an effective blend of performance and narrative, has brought many tales to dramatic life.
Here narrative is subordinated to vivid impressionism, expressed in a series of imaginative set-pieces interweaving fact and fantasy, offering colour at some cost in coherence.
Since Hearn's fame rests mainly on his life and work in Japan, it cannot but be noticed that he arrives in his adopted country only in the last 10-15 minutes or so of the two-hour play, leaving the biographical content less than complete.
Programme notes compensate to an extent, but inevitably point to the lack in the script.
This is nonetheless a production with a fascinating difference, and the cast - Aoife Molony, Colin O'Donoghue, Diane O'Keefe, Conan Sweeny and Maria Tecce - inhabit their multiple roles with authority.
Runs to April 9th, then goes on national tour
Franceschetti, RTÉ NSO/Houlihan, NCH, Dublin
Andrew Johnstone
Tchaikovsky - Capriccio italien
Rachmaninov - Paganini Rhapsody
Sibelius - Symphony No 1
This week's RTÉ NSO/The Irish Times Tour comprises four repeat performances of the concert the orchestra gave last Friday with the pianist Davide Franceschetti, who won the GPA Dublin International Piano Competition in 1994, and under the direction of the Kerry-based conductor Robert Houlihan.
It was an auspicious start to a tour.
The attractive programme occupies an appealing middle ground between the popular and the esoteric: the composers are old favourites, yet the works are not their most hackneyed ones.
And the Italian connection in both Russian items neatly offsets Sibelius's Nordic brooding.
That said, Tchaikovsky's Capriccio sounded very much like the work of a Russian on holiday: despite its alleged indebtedness to Italian folksong, its glow was not the outer glow of the Mediterranean sunshine, but the inner glow of a glass of vodka.
This may have been due to a certain deliberateness on Houlihan's part, a deliberateness that nonetheless yielded impressive results.
From the outset, the playing was characterised by conscientious attention to detail, particularly in the strings, and by a palpable sense of concertare - the urge to play as one.
Rachmaninov's final work for piano and orchestra has that rare quality of being both a technical tour de force and a feast for the ears, something to admire as well as to enjoy.
Though titled Rhapsody, it's no unplanned fantasia but a taut set of variations in which piano and orchestra engage in a more subtle dialogue than theywould in the average concerto.
For much of the time the solo pianist actually functions as an accompanist to other instrumentalists.
Here Franceschetti seemed not entirely to share the close bond that was evident between conductor and orchestra. When left to his own devices in the virtuosic passages, however, he played with verve.
Though not exactly a neglected work, Sibelius's First Symphony has never achieved the same critical and popular success as his later ones.
But the fervent advocacy with which it was conducted and played on Friday made it seem less like a derivative apprentice piece and more like a prophetic prelude to the whole Sibelius cycle.
In a concert that took the RTÉ NSO soaring to dizzy heights, Houlihan's impeccably judged and ever-thrilling account of this work was the highest point of all.
Willie Nelson, The Point, Dublin
Peter Crawley
Everybody wants a piece of Willie Nelson. And, generous to a fault, the country music legend - who turns 72 this month - still seems happy to oblige.
This is why the last of a succession of bandanas, carefully tied around his brow, spends precisely three seconds with Nelson before he throws it to another grateful fan with one fluid, practised motion.
Nelson's performance in The Point - brisk, magnanimous and familiar - coasts by with all the ease of that gesture; another dutiful showing of a seemingly ceaseless tour, a study in giving them what they want.
Having long since established his niche as "outlaw country", a genre that abandoned the production polish of Nashville for the rupture of rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, Nelson rattles through the self-mythologising Whiskey River, Still is Still Moving to Me and Beer for My Horses, his voice as warm and arid as heat-warped timber.
Forever the outsider, Nelson's phrasing and the ragged jangle of his battered guitar stay reliably off-centre; his lyrics asking liquor to take his mind, while raising glasses against evil forces or eulogising fallen bandits and broken hearts.
Yet he has a cannily possessive streak too, stringing Funny How Time Just Slips Away, timeless classic Crazy and The Night Life - each written for other singers - through a perfunctory medley.
Still, country music is rarely fixated with ownership, and Nelson interleaves his own considerable back catalogue with several tributes, nodding respect to Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams and even Kinky Friedman.
Playing for almost two hours, Nelson's band complements the familiar tunes with understated piano, raspy guitar licks and softly braying harmonica, providing little distraction from the main focus.
Between the signature tune of On the Road Again and the dry poignancy of Like Yesterday's Wine, Nelson scuttles across the lip of the stage signing countless autographs and clasping innumerable hands.
He is aware to the last that icons, like outlaws, must keep moving.
Music Migrations, various venues, Cork
Colm Murphy
Any reservations one could have at the prospect of an accordion band were quickly dispelled by the Motion Trio of Poland, at the Everyman Palace Theatre, as part of A Continent Undivided, the European music festival which has just finished and is part of Cork's Music Migrations series.
Unaided by electrical gadgetry, Janusz Wojtarrowicz, Pavel Baranek and Marcin Golozyn produced a beguiling set. Lovely Eastern European melodies floated over sonic bass lines and percussive tattoos, that felt at times like a string quartet edging toward adult jazz. Sounds of War was both disquieting and wonderful for the desolation evoked by these exceptional musicians, and in First Day of Spring, the appreciative house was swept along by this unique ensemble's good nature and style.
Where the Motion trio allowed room for the imagination, Enzo Avitabile & Bottari covered every angle and then some, in the second half of this double-header. With collaborations alongside James Brown and Tina Turner under his (ample) belt, Avitabile has been using the traditions of Campania in his native southern Italy as a springboard to deeper Mediterranean influences for the past few years.
The Bottari (born of the medieval tradition of hammering on olive barrels to expel demons from field and cellar) provide a dynamic drumscape reminiscent of Japan's Kodo and the drummers of Burundi. Add to this keyboards, backline, brass with mandolin and mandola, and Enzo's world music is his oyster. A very impressive sax player, Avitabile's brass-driven melodies are decorated with sorties from mandolin and mandola, underpinned by the irresistible Bottari pulse on Tarrentella Bruno and Save the World. The form dissipated somewhat toward the end, with audience-embracing rampant; but overall a welcome blast of Mediterranean air.
In 1979 Saliman Shukar gave a concert on the UD (North African Lute) in Cork's Crawford Gallery. The instrument returned with Radio Tarifa to the Everyman as part of the Music Migrations series, and how things have changed.
A full house seemed mostly Hispanic, and the UD had grown a perspex soundboard and leather trousers. Nevertheless, drawing from a well of flamenco, Andalucían and African desert musics, Radio Tarifa's set had an historical coherence often missing in world music. The percussion of founder Fain Duenas underwrites the set, and coupled with flamenco clipping/clapping throughout, was perfectly pitched. With guitars and UD from Gomez and Haddad dipping in and out of African/ Iberian traditions, hypnotic and compelling string work rarely lost its purpose. Vincent Molino's playing on cromorno, neys and oboe de Poitou was exquisite, and matched by Jaime Muela's more contemporary sax/flutes gluing the act together.
Singer Benjamin Evcoriza gave it macho/flamenco holly, and while his shaping ruffled a few feathers, his vocals were authentic and true; and on a wet night in Cork, the happy audience souked it all up.
Two Large Gilded Lions bookend the stage at the Savoy Theatre, Cork, appropriately flanking the leonine figure of Portuguese Diva, Mariza, in the final event. The tradition of fado is probably best known through the voice of Amalia Rodrigues; the songs of passion, heartbreak and joy are rich and sinuous, quite distinct from the neighbouring flamenco form. Mozambique born, Mariza was raised in Lisbon's fado house culture, and her reputation as a rejuvenator of this tradition preceded her to the European City of Culture.
The result was a triumph. Band members Antonio Neto (acoustic guitar), Luis Guerreiro (Portuguese guitar), Fernando DeSousa (acoustic bass) and Poao Pedro Ruela (pere) displayed stoical brilliance throughout; the sting of the Portuguese guitar was effortlessly drawn by wonderful acoustic guitar and bass.
And then there was Mariza. This woman is a star. Gliding over an artfully lit stage, mixing archness and wonder; with one hand nonchalantly thrust in a pocket, she had the audience in the other from the off, her understated stagecraft allowed her compelling voice acres of dramatic space. Her interpretation of the work of poet José Luis Gordo was a fusion of passion and musical integrity. Mariza describes Prima Vera as her favourite fado, and her take was rich with candour and verve.
Incredibly downing amplification for the last song (to create the atmosphere of a Lisbon fado house), Mariza and her band filled the large theatre with unaffected brilliance, all the way to the gods. This night of fado music was to be treasured.
