Reviews

A look at what is happening in the world of the arts

José Carreras, Point Theatre, Dublin

In company with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the conductor David Giménez, and the 32 voices of Glória, José Carreras charmed his loosely-packed Saturday night audience with a programme dominated by Neapolitan song.

Though he made few concessions to the microphone, he fared better than the other performers with the amplified sound, which smeared natural timbres with an unpleasant metallic sheen, and conferred the woodwinds with a blameless but undue prominence.

Vocally, Carreras was in great shape. In ten billed solos and five encores, he stuck largely to what he's good at, those bitter-sweet Mediterranean love lyrics which he delivers sempre con passione.

Hardly a phrase goes by without pulls of emotion that hint now at sobs, now at ironic laughter.

The barely suppressed sigh of his sotto voce fleetly alternates with arching portamenti of formidable power.

And his full reserves of vibrato never desert the closing bars.

From the opening couple of songs by Mario Costa (Luna nova and Era de maggio), the full range of his artistry was on show in a succession of very similar numbers.

A pair of Hispanic pieces (El eco de tu voz by Albéniz and Rosó, pel teu amor by Josep Ribas) were, however, of a character and quality that stood out memorably from the pervading style.

There were just two, ill-advised excursions into English with Some Enchanted Evening (his first encore) and Brave New World, an unfortunate neo-anthem that set a trite though well-meaning text to themes from Dvorák's Ninth Symphony.

This was the only solo item with choral backing.

Elsewhere, the Glória choristers took centre stage in two popular choruses by Verdi. If their youthful, well disciplined sound was on the light side here, it proved ideal for their unaccompanied encore She Moved Through The Fair.

Under their own director Liz Powell, they turned this to a moment of chilly poignancy whose contrast with Carreras's outpourings couldn't have been starker.

Andrew Johnstone

NCC/Antunes, St Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork

For an artist, even the raw and horrific can contain something of beauty. This unsettling paradox exists in Litene by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks.

It was one of eight mostly contemporary pieces performed on Friday night as part of the Cork International Choral Festival by the National Chamber Choir under their artistic director Celso Antunes.

Litene is a village where Soviet occupying forces executed Latvian army officers in 1941. Vasks creates initial expectation with soft, high-pitched clusters in the sopranos and altos, leading to increasingly harrowing responses to the two-verse account of the atrocity by Uldis Berzins.

A man groans holding a radio to his ear; a nation screams; someone flees in blind terror: all are disturbingly - though not programmatically - evoked by Vasks's powerful music.

The choir surmounted all harmonic and technical challenges to produce a truly moving performance that presented both sides of the beauty-horror paradox.

They were equally effective throughout the concert, including both the gentler context of Rudolf Escher's 1955 settings of Emily Dickinson, Songs of Love and Eternity, and in the macabre chill of Einojuhani Rautavaara's Suite de Lorca, four Lorca poems which the composer unifies with the galloping rhythms of a horse-borne grim reaper.

The concert included the world premiere of two movements from Almanac, a cycle about the seasons by Irish composer James Wilson.

The second, a setting of The Wild Swans at Coole by Yeats, drifts seamlessly from long melodic lines over scrunchy hummed chords to quiet unisons to thick-textured homophony, rather hymn-like except with kaleidoscopic harmonies.

The import of Wilson's inventiveness was largely lost, however, since neither text was included in the printed programme.

In fact, in a concert sub-titled A Choral Journey in Words and Music, only half the words were provided. Penderecki, Norgard, and Henze suffered the same fate as Wilson.

Since these pieces are composers' responses to words, not providing these words amounts to aesthetic bankruptcy akin to a cinema showing a film without the sound.

Michael Dungan

Colm Wilkinson, Vicar Street, Dublin

How much of your life can you spend in stage musicals before you finally have to emigrate there? Colm Wilkinson, the Dublin-born, Canada-based Broadway veteran has long resided in the land where every emotion packs a crescendo, where each footstep is met by the caress of dry ice, where you can't turn around for revolving stages.

The homecoming show of his one-man revue, Some of My Best Friends Are Songs, gives him the chance to shrug off the immodesty and excess - the ham and cheese, if you will - of Musical Land. Another singer might have taken it.

Whether swooshing through the audience with a cape and lantern, or telling painfully old jokes, or innocently inquiring if anybody has "travelled some distance" to be here (before reminding the people from Boston that they had), Wilkinson remains dazzlingly self-obsessed.

This is fine for the showboating brio of country rocker Tenessee Waltz or the call and response corniness of toe-tapper Got My Mojo Working ("Now just the ladies. Now the men. Now the ladies over 50!"). It's only marginally egregious in the stentorian overkill of Some Enchanted Evening or Somewhere.

But when he brings on his son, Aaron, for a toe-curling duet of Cat Stephen's Father and Son - their eyes closed tight, their heads lolling in unison - only its unwitting comedy value sustains your tolerance.

That Colm then leaves us alone with Aaron for a seven-song, 20-minute set of original numbers completely blows it. "This is not an intermission," says Colm as he departs.

After that there's little Wilkinson can do to remove the bitter aftertaste.

His five-piece band swell purposefully behind Man of La Mancha and the long-threatened Bring Him Home, but a self-indulgent cover of John Lennon's Imagine again points to the awkward customs of Musical Land.

They serve up the showstoppers with the ones that merely slow it.

Peter Crawley

Black Eyed Peas, Dublin Castle

The Heineken Green Energy Festival is founded on an adorably optimistic notion: that the Irish summer will somehow coincide with the May bank holiday weekend.

Still, as Dublin concerts move tentatively outdoors, it's wise to have some insurance. Thankfully the Black Eyed Peas know that if you want to keep warm, you have to keep moving.

Breakdancers first and foremost, suppliers of party soundtracks second, LA's Black Eyed Peas now seem to have placed socially conscious hip-hop further down their list of priorities.

With the success of Elephunk, their 2003 album, Black Eyed Peas have tasted the sugary lure of mainstream pop and they seem to like the stuff.

The upshot is that good times don't roll out quicker than Hey Mama, a sheeny turbo-ragga which sets its tempo by the gyrating hips of Fergie, a performer with the voice of a soul diva in the body of a pole-dancer.

Meanwhile her fellow MCs Will.I.Am, Apl.de.Ap and Taboo perform backflips, splits and uncanny impersonations of a flying pretzel.

When the Peas reluctantly conform to the laws of gravity, however, the rhymes seem less limber.

"If it smells like funk, it must be us," they sing with neither the sparkle of pop nor the surge of hip-hop.

If it smells like a Saturday morning chart show but looks like a frat-house keg party it may be them too.

Reaching an early peak with Shut Up - a screaming lovers' tiff set to music that, naturally, Fergie wins - the Peas shuffle in playful songs from their forthcoming album.

But having delivered signature tune Where is the Love? within an hour, they then seem at a loss what to do.

Interminable jams are hardly the answer and ceaseless chants of "I-R-E-L-A-N-D" feel as warmly ingratiating as a remedial geography class.

Even pumped-up recent singles can't reignite those early sparks, and so our summer begins with a chill.

Peter Crawley