Reviews

Events in Belfast, Dublin and Cork.

The Maids, Belfast Exposed Photographic Gallery, Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival: One has to pass through a series of photographic portraits of solitary individuals in unlikely, illusory settings, to reach the heady, perfumed boudoir created in the furthest dark reaches of the Belfast Exposed Gallery.

Jean Genet's world is one of luminous beauty and moral and sexual ambiguity, where criminals, prostitutes, pimps and murderers offer up their own version of the human condition.

Director Peter Quigley and his C21 company acquit themselves with bravery and brio in Genet's queasy interpretation of the savage, real-life killing of a rich Parisienne and her daughters by their maids, the incestuous Papin sisters, Solange and Clare.

Amongst the candles, mirrors, incense, flowers and crushed velvet trappings of their mistress's bedroom, Chris Robinson's Solange and Mark Claney's Clare act out their own sado-masochistic drama of love and servitude.

All is explained by the arrival of Emma Little's glamorous, shrill madame. The sisters' barely concealed contempt for all she represents is inextricably mixed with their fascination for her expensive possessions and social superiority.

Quigley has coaxed a compelling clandestine urgency out of the performances of his young actors, who never once flinch from the challenge of winding us into the ultimate sacrificial ritual in a world where morality, religion, sexuality and conventional notions of right and wrong are blurred and inverted. - Jane Coyle

Tinney, RTÉ NSO/Markson, NCH, Dublin:

Markevitch - Icare.

Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No 3. Stravinsky - Rite of Spring.

Igor Markevitch was just 20 when he wrote the ballet L'envoi d'Icare in 1932. When he revised it under the title Icare in 1943 (dropping the inevitably awkward use of a group of instruments tuned a quarter tone above the rest of the orchestra) he had already given up composition. Thereafter his profile in the musical world was that of a highly successful conductor, his early achievements largely forgotten about until a few years before his death in 1983.

Icare shows Markevitch the composer's fondness for an orchestral style of sophisticated primitivism. The melodic writing is dry, the sense of forward movement often combines elements of passacaglia and walking bass.

It's like a kind of desensualised Roussel or Honegger, yet it's also absolutely individual. Friday's performance by the RTÉ NSO under Gerhard Markson captured well the strange mixture of distance and immediacy, which is one of the most fascinating characteristics of Markevitch's music.

Hugh Tinney was the soloist in the third and most popular of Prokofiev's piano concertos, a work of pointed brilliance that functions at the opposite pole of emotional engagement to the Markevitch.

Tinney's approach was like that of a meticulous scientist, carefully trying to make sure that every last element of the formula was in its place.

It was an achievement of admirable musicianship, fully supported by a reliable technique and limited only by a certain lack of freedom and an excessive eschewal of overt flamboyance.

There was no shortage of that kind of flamboyance in Markson's handling of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

The Rite was Markevitch's greatest calling card as a conductor, and Markson, who studied with Markevitch, gave it his all, with spectacular results.

It's not that he was aiming for spectacle. The Rite is diminished by approaches which deliver it as orchestral showpiece, pure and simple. Markson didn't indulge in that sort of sanitisation .

The uncouth rawness of Stravinsky's writing was not tamed, the precision sought was expressive rather than technical, and the outpouring of energy was greater than any I can recall hearing from this orchestra in this work in the past. - Michael Dervan

Daughters Of Albion, Cork Opera House: When the aunt of all English folk singers, June Tabor referred to the recent horrors of foot-and-mouth, the kinship of two nation's song traditions was underlined.

Songs sourced in rural life, the sea, love, murder and horses; delivered by five highly respected singers in a finely tuned musical setting vindicated all those involved in a tricky pilot project and was a credit to the 2005 Capital of Culture programme and Philip King.

Opening in unison, Norma Waterson, Eliza Carthy, June Tabor, Katheryn Williams and Thea Gilmore nailed down a north country ballad with the confident harmonies that give the genre its reputation.

The wonderful Norma Waterson sang songs penned by her sister Lal and older songs with an ease and dignity that set the standard for a night's intertwining of contemporary and ancient works.

Katheryn Williams sang her own songs with a nicely pitched oddness that deftly offset the sobering presence of longtime doyenne June Tabor.

Tabor's dramatic gravitas jostled with a voice that, in a macaronic version of Lily Marlene held the audience enthralled.

Formidable, unaffected, curvaceous and likeable would describe Eliza Carthy's fiddle playing, but not do justice to the lady herself.

Rightly seen as the burning star of English folk music, Carthy's repertoire from the past and present was a sheer delight; delivered with an authenticity and verve that we could have listened to all night.

Directed by Kate St John, the excellent 10-piece house band gave Eliza's opener the Tom Waits treatment, and throughout the night never put a foot wrong in a variety of settings.

Hosted by Karan Casey who gave us a show-stopping "sean nós" song from her native Waterford tradition, "The Daughters of Albion" concert was a seminal event, and long may this project prosper. - Colm Murphy