Reviews

Alfred Brendel will celebrate his 75th birthday next January.

Mozart - Duport Variations.

Schumann - Kreisleriana.

Schubert - Moments musicaux Nos 1, 2, 4.

Beethoven - Sonata in D Op 28 (Pastoral)

But you would never have guessed that fact either from his appearance on the concert platform or the freshness of his piano playing in Sunday's recital opening the new NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Series at the National Concert Hall.

Brendel is a performer who likes to indulge both himself and his listeners by showing how a musician can have his cake and eat it.

His playing can be both rich and simple at the same time. He rarely gives a performance that hides from being the outcome of deep consideration, and yet his music-making can sound utterly spontaneous.

Parts of Mozart's Variations on a theme of Duport have an almost clockwork feel to them. Yet Brendel never fell into the trap of sounding prim or precious here.

In Schumann's Kreisleriana, a celebration of the eccentric Kappelmeister created by ETA Hoffmann, as well as of the composer's passion for his beloved Clara, Brendel paid as much attention to the music's poetic ardency as to the agitation of spirit which often distracts performers into mere flashiness. The heady richness of texture, line and harmony that he controlled so minutely was at times utterly mesmerising.

Schubert is the composer with whom Brendel seems at once most fully at home and most free. He has the knack of, as it were, being able to curve time without distortion, as well as managing to turn the world on a single note or chord.

It was a little surprising, then, that the alternating right-hand, left-hand emphases in the fourth of Schubert's Moments musicaux should have sounded schoolmasterish, as it did.

But the off-beat, dissonant harmonies of the central D-flat major section were most poignantly done, and the ruminations of the first and second pieces were full of imaginative wisdom.

It is rare for Beethoven's Pastoral Sonata to sound both as grounded and as fantastical as it did in Brendel's hands. But that is his gift, to make the familiar sound new and wonderful, not quite predictable but ineluctably right. - Michael Dervan

Basement Jaxx- Marlay Park

Dance music is dead, apparently. Watching helplessly as their last records plummeted south of nowhere, superstar DJs dropped their fists, hung up their headphones and allowed rock to reclaim its rightful place as the headline act.

But wait. What's this? As Marlay Park bathes in perfect sunshine, a man called Mylo is launching a counter attack. The song, appropriately, is called Destroy Rock & Roll.

This isn't a death match, however, as Myles MacInnes well knows. In fact, if the Bud Rising festival proves anything, it's that dance and rock have had to meet each other halfway.

Mylo's debut album was constructed over two years on a single computer, but today he performs it with a full band, letting Drop the Pressure and In My Arms unfurl like a lazy broad smile.

"We actually contemplated doing this gig sober," he mumbles to appreciative cheers.

The day grows halcyon in the late summer haze, but while Underworld offer the nostalgic rush of Born Slippy, the dreary insistence of their stale ideas eats egregiously into the stage time of tonight's main draw.

Basement Jaxx don't complain though. Their set buzzes with the voltage of a greatest hits show, recognising again the reassuring fleshiness of live musicians. The full-throated holler of their singers, the vigour of their dancing and a stabbing brass section makes Romeo, Rendez-Vu and Do Your Thing sound both lubricious and riotous.

Merging the fray and distortion of rock with the propulsion and playfulness of dance, Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Burton know that dance needs a party, not a wake.

Shooting Red Alert and Where's Your Head At? through a sparkling light show, the sound and spectacle of their dance display could not be in ruder health. - Peter Crawley