Irish Times writers review the latest happenings in the arts world.
Apocalypse
Everyman Palace, Cork
There's no gloom at all in the Theatre Cryptic production of Apocalypse at the Everyman Palace but my goodness, there's an awful lot of doom.
The audience is not so much spell-bound as pole-axed.
This is catastrophe as art: climate change, eruptions, tidal waves sweeping across half the oceans of the world, accelerated erosion and, if we thought it possible to evade or escape natural disasters on a scale hitherto unknown to mankind, we've added our own plague to the list in the form of Aids. Oh, and bio-terror. And perhaps George Bush. It's a poor lookout, basically.
Yet this performance, directed by Cathy Boyd's relentless hand, is so visually captivating and aurally stunning that its cataclysmic message is not only forgivable, but acceptable as intrinsic. Dressed as if in cere-cloths, a white-clad Mark O'Keefe is the solo trumpeter for the initial heraldic phrases of Anthea Haddow's score.
From there on, playing to and against Haddow's pre-recorded orchestral sound design, the music revels in the virtuoso potential of the instrument, marvellously, and authoritatively, demonstrated by O'Keefe (using three different trumpets).
He and the six trumpeters who lead the production to its thrilling conclusion are collaborating in a work which is seen as a whole, not as a display opportunity, although its celebration of the trumpet as an age-old clarion is intended.
Based on the Book of Revelations, the piece is a kind of controlled computerised musical explosion in which the lighting design by Nich Smith and Martin Parker's real time visuals are, like everything else, choreographed: they create movement and images and crescendos of sound, melting video phantoms and fusions by which amplified breath blisters into shape on a screen which consumes itself in yet another conflagration.
Supported as a project for Cork 2005 the work - lasting for approximately 45 minutes - has been conceived, and succeeds, as a unique mixture of bravura musicianship and utterly disciplined technological imagination.
Until April 16th at 021 450 1673
Mary Leland
_________________________________________________________
Kovacic, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Apollon musagète.
Brahms - Violin Concerto.
It was Stravinsky himself who described his Symphonies of Wind Instruments as "an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments". And although he also remarked that the piece was "not meant to 'please' an audience, nor to arouse its passions" there's no doubting the fact that it can delight the ear.
That's exactly what it did in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's performance under Gerhard Markson on Friday. Markson and his players presented the fragmented writing in, as it were, a neutral lighting, so that the unusual mixtures of Stravinsky's scoring could be shown to best advantage. The performance also caught the music's relationship to the near and distant past (the Three Pieces for string quartet, The Rite of Spring, the practices of the 18th century) as well as its strongly hieratic nature. The dedication is "To the memory of Claude Achille Debussy," and the first part of the work to be made public was the closing chorale, published in a memorial issue of the Revue musicale.
The Symphonies of Wind Instruments was completed in 1920. The ballet Apollon musagète, scored for an orchestra of strings (34 players being the composer's suggested complement), was completed in 1928. It was, said Stravinsky, "my first attempt to compose a large-scale work in which contrasts of volumes replace contrasts of instrumental colours". Its neo-classicism is almost chastely austere, and it demands unusual restraint from performers in its need to sidestep some of the more automatic colourings of musical expression. The NSO's playing had too much of conventional heart, and too little of precision when it came to dynamics and textures. The more this work sounds like other string orchestra pieces, the less it sounds like itself.
After the interval, Ernst Kovacic played the Brahms Violin Concerto as if he understood the import of every last gesture in this great work.
There have been more overtly virtuosic and technically secure performances of this piece heard at the National Concert Hall in recent years. But none of them communicated Kovacic's sense of going so consistently, successfully and stirringly to the heart of the music.
Michael Dervan
