Reviews

Irish Times writers review Mother Courage and Her Children in Purgatory, Andrea Bocelli, Oasis and RTÉ NSO/Altschuler

Mother Courage and Her Children in Purgatory

Fisheries Field, Galway

Fintan O'Toole

The "in Purgatory" that is added to the title of Bertolt Brecht's great play Mother Courage and Her Children by the creator of this world premiere at the Galway Arts Festival matters a great deal.

Brecht's parable evokes the horrors of war and the follies of those who believe they can live with it. But it is also surrounded by the author's Marxist faith in a better future, his sense that when the horror and folly are fully understood, war will end.

Mauricio Celedon, creator of this extraordinary Chilean-Spanish-French production for Teatro del Silencio and Karlik Danza Teatro, has no such faith. The war business that Mother Courage traded on is still going strong, and Celedon evokes its purgatorial afterlife in this fragmentary, mysterious but deeply impressive spectacle.

Purgatory ends eventually, of course, but not anytime soon and this show is haunted by despair and the yearning of lost souls.

If Brecht might have disapproved of this mood, Celedon's approach would have intrigued him in at least one respect. The problem with Mother Courage for Brecht was that people insisted on sympathising with its protagonist. He intended the woman who follows the armies in the Hundred Years War with her cart and children to be an object of cool appraisal.

War devours her children one by one and still she persists, dragging her cart through the battles and the years. But instead of thinking about her blindness, audiences tended to admire her resilience, to sentimentalise the hard-edged parable into a tale of endurance.

In his own way, Celedon has created a form that makes it impossible to identify with or have sympathy for the people in the story. The story itself is barely told, and indeed it would be hard for an audience that didn't at least have a general idea of what happens to discern it from the action here.

This is really an extended riff on incidents and images from Brecht's original in which moments of the play are interwoven with figments of war that touch on the Somme, the Holocaust and, through the Arabic and Islamic elements used at the end, current events.

To borrow an analogy from visual art, its relationship to Mother Courage is that of Francis Bacon's screaming pope to Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent: a passionate, agonised, distorted reflection of a cool, controlled classic. Viewed through this prism, Celedon's show has a compelling, visceral integrity.

It happens in the open air, on a patch of dirt, deliberately evoking the scorched earth of a battlefield, marked out by ugly steel and mesh cages at one end, a small shelter for a five-man electric band at the other. A steel rig for lights, ropes and trapezes dominated the centre.

It may seem perverse to stage a show which uses classically-trained dancers outdoors on bumpy ground, but in fact the rawness, vulnerability and openness to the contingencies of light, weather, noise and insects are crucial to the energy of the piece.

Celedon wishes to conjure the spirit of war, and war is all about exposure. The piece he has created is utterly exposed, both figuratively in the sense of having no comfortable form, and literally; there is male and female nakedness, which, along with the vivid evocations of violence, make it unsuitable for children.

This genuine sense of exposure banishes the air of self- indulgence that so often accompanies work that leaves established texts and forms behind. The performers invest so much of their bodies - they have the power of athletes and the skill of acrobats - and of their hearts that they deserve open minds in return. And those who are open to it can find a dazzling symphony of counterpoints: shocking ugliness and breathtaking beauty, unrefined directness and subtle skill, bluntness and enigma.

It is like being at a circus, a rock concert, a Spanish festival procession, a mediaeval fair, a classical ballet, a football match and a dervish dance - all at once.

We can be enthralled by all of those events without feeling the need to "understand" them, and Celedon and his performers have earned the right not to be understood either.

Andrea Bocelli

Collins Barracks, Cork

Mary Leland

The first music of the Andrea Bocelli concert at Collins Barracks in Cork last Friday night was Taps. Sounded by a trio of buglers and drummer and applauded by 10,000 people watching Flag-Down, this is the ceremony with which the Army ends each day.

The performance which followed seemed as if it had been arranged with the same clarity of purpose and the same level of accustomed expertise.

Bocelli, of course, was the star of the evening, but he shone as part of a galaxy: only a little more radiant than soprano Paola Sanguinetti, while Marcello Rota, conductor of the Czech National Symphony orchestra, worked with a responsive, supportive brilliance crucial to the integrity of the presentation.

They construct the background for Bocelli, for whom adultation rose in waves of warmth and sympathy. He earned the adultation in a generous programme designed to suit his mellow tone and his command of those long Italian phrases. Excelling in songs such as Non ti scordar di me or Santa Lucia Lantana, his rapport with the orchestra was always sensitive and particularly strong for the arias such as Puccini's E lucevan le stelle from Tosca.

There was a luscious quality to the rich orchestration of Tosti's La Serenata, for example, which suggested that both musically and stylistically these songs are his alternative metier. Opera demands as much character as voice and is not easily adapted to such an outdoor scenario as this occasion, although Lehar's Tu che m'hai preso il cuor was as smooth and ardent as could be desired despite the incessant disruption of late-comers.

Blessed with a rich tone and a fine understanding, opera suits Sanguinetti's voice, her technique allowing her to sing with the evening breeze in her hair, her bronze tresses floating like her voice above the enraptured crowd. Her familiar partnership with Bocelli has a tender quality and in O soave fanciulla from La Boheme they created that sense of fragile enchantment which Puccini must have intended. Again it was Tosti who brought out Bocelli's pure high notes for A vuchella.

The choice of condensed arias and duets gave more time for Torna a Sorriento and O sole mio, but the final programme flourish of the Brindisi duet from Verdi's La Boheme suited the beautifully-matched voices of both singers to perfection.

Like Taps, such concerts work to a formula by now, and when, after Bocelli's two solo encores he was joined by Sanguinetti for a wind-blown Time to Say Goodbye, even the longing audience could not mistake the message.

Oasis

Marlay Park

Kevin Courtney

Ten years after Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger became anthems for the post-baggy generation, we're all a lot older but, it would seem, not much wiser. Here we are again, waiting in anticipation for the giant non-event that is your typical Oasis gig.

Believe the truth: the Gallagher brothers are still a major crowd-puller, and though we know there won't be any surprises (bar a sudden walk-off by Liam) or radical stylistic shifts, we're well up for it anyway. Will we ever learn?

Manchester's favourite sons strut onstage, older, wilier, and looking leaner and cooler than they've looked since their Knebworth-packing heyday.

Liam sports a white beanie hat and khaki combat jacket, and casts a stony glare across the expanse of Marlay Park. Noel has a permanently pained expression that has probably been etched on by years of putting up with little bruvver's bad behaviour.

Guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell have been in Oasis for five years now, so you can't really call them the new guys. Drummer Zak Starkey, son of Ringo, is a recent addition, double-jobbing with both Oasis and The Who. Keyboard player Jay Darlington looks like George Harrison circa My Sweet Lord.

"Don't call him Jesus - Liam will only get jealous," quips Noel.

Oasis's new album, Don't Believethe Truth, is, by their somewhat plodding standards, a return to form, and in Marlay Park on a balmy Saturday evening Lyla establishes itself firmly as a classic Oasis anthem, cheekily pilfering The Stones' Street Fighting Man and tacking on a terrace-shaking chorus. Current single, The Importance of Being Idle, is a Chas 'n' Dave style barrelhouse in the tradition of She's Electric.

But we all know that it's classic tunes from Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory that keep us coming out to see the Manky boys; Cigarettes and Alcohol sees Liam sneering at our anti-smoking legislation, and Live Forever Sees the crowd taking over and singing it while Liam gives us the 1,000 yard stare.

Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova and Rock 'n' Roll Star provide a hit-heavy finish, and an encore of Don't Look Back in Anger lets us all look back fondly on a time when Oasis mattered a lot more. This gig may not have been the second coming, but at least it had a few saving graces.

RTÉ NSO/Altschuler

NCH, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Tchaikovsky - Romeo and Juliet

Saint-Saëns - Carnival of the Animals

Khachaturian - Spartacus Suite No 2

Ravel - Bolero

Saint-Saëns believed that his Carnival of the Animals would be a popular piece. Yet he withheld it from publication during his lifetime for fear that such a whimsical exercise in musical humour would damage his reputation.

He was right, of course, to have anticipated the work's great popularity, and it is doubtful he would have approved the way it has eclipsed his other work.

Even he, however, could hardly have predicted how, in the English-speaking world, it would find itself so regularly coupled with the verses penned for it by Ogden Nash in the mid-20th century.

Friday's performance by the RTÉ NSO under Vladimir Altschuler found Cathryn Brennan rather too self-consciously and she made it all sound a little tortuous.

The two pianists were Dearbhla and Finghin Collins, who played with admirable poise and excellent ensemble, although they took the idea of gaucherie in the scales and exercises of Pianists rather too far.

Conductor Vladimir Altschuler was as warm-hearted in the buffoonery of the Saint-Saëns as he had been in the passionate glow of Tchaikovsky's fantasy-overture, Romeo and Juliet, which opened the concert.

The Second Suite from Khachaturian's Spartacus is the one which contains the famous Adagio, tuneful, lurid Kitsch, which is followed by a rather watery attempt to recreate the success of the composer's earlier Sabre Dance. Altschuler responded freely to the music's easy emotionalism and brash excitability.

He opted for a few unusual instrumental balances in Ravel's Bolero which did rather seem to detract from the sense of trajectory on which this piece so heavily depends. The audience, however, was untroubled by the glitches, and gave Ravel's most famous work a rousing response.