Among the events reviwed today are the 10th Sligo Festival of Baroque Music and a performance of Diaghilev and the Red Shoes
10th Sligo Festival of Baroque Music at the Model Arts & Niland Gallery/ Calry Church, Sligo
For the 10th year running, Baroque specialists from Ireland and overseas were gathered in Sligo for a busy weekend's music-making.
This time, their focus has been on the court of Louis XIV, with a sequence of events cleverly devised by artistic director Rod Alston to offer varied glimpses of the rarefied style of the grand siecle.
In this music, gesture takes precedence over form and harmony, and a degree of tasteful decoration and inflection is absolutely required of the performer.
Making her first appearance at the festival, harpsichordist Carole Cerasi revelled with abundant good taste in works by François Couperin, Louis-Claude Daquin and the less well known Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, the wife of one of Couperin's cousins.
Running beneath the stylised surface of La Guerre's music is a determined, intellectual quality that places her on a par with the best composers of her school, and explains why she has been taken to heart by a player of Cerasi's calibre.
Irish harpsichordist Malcolm Proud appears annually at the festival, this year as continuo player, accompanist and soloist in three of the eight concerts.
With characteristically mature accounts of two solos by Louis Couperin, Proud picked up the French thread in a concert with Baroque violinist Claire Duff that also sampled the Italian and Austrian repertories.
These artists share both an instinctive regard for the music's subtleties, and the intention of engaging rather than merely impressing their listeners.
If Proud's accompaniment was occasionally too richly sonorous for Duff's gut strings, that was a small price to pay for the sheer unselfconsciousness of her historical technique.
Duff was at her best in two highly individual and unpredictable sonatas by JH Schmeltzer and Heinrich Biber, turning their schizophrenic idiom into something variegated, surprising and spontaneous.
A late evening performance by Ireland's Little Consort interspersed the seven pavanes of John Dowland's Lachrimae cycle with some of his consort and lute songs. This was courtly music of a very different hue.
Shunning the purely ornamental, and obtaining variety with the minimum of variation, these soulful pieces made their point all the more effectively in the wake of the day's French treats.
Sunday's festival events offered further perspectives on this year's potential-laden theme.
There was a children's workshop production of the French fairytale "Puss in Boots", and the Festival Chamber Orchestra could be heard rehearsing apposite repertoire in period style under Claire Duff.
Richard Sweeney gave a recital of lute and theorbo music that charted the progress of the dance forms central to French instrumental writing, and included a suite by the Sun King's guitar teacher, Robert de Visée.
There was dance music, too, in the festival's second concert by traverso flautist Wilbert Hazelzet, Malcolm Proud, and gamba player Sarah Cunningham.
Though during most of the pieces Proud's instrument had its lid only slightly ajar, its wonderful loudness tended to overshadow Hazelzet's deliciously delicate warblings. But there was never a moment's doubt that this was period ensemble playing of the highest order.
While the festival has concentrated chiefly on secular court music, Sunday ended at Calry Church with a rare, candlelit performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Lumiéres de ténèbres.
In these extraordinary settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, there are few traces of the polyphonic style generally associated with sacred composition. Instead, two soloists prolong each syllable with astonishingly extended arabesques.
This linear vocalise would have benefited from more focused production and more settled intonation than it received from sopranos Julia Gooding and Mhairi Lawson. That said, the well-matched duo articulated their elaborate and unending ornamentation with native fluency.
Gary Cooper (harpsichord) and Paula Chateauneuf (theorbo) concocted a varied accompaniment with conspicuous imagination and taste.
Ever alert to the soloists' nuances, yet still personalising their own contributions, they revealed an absolute affinity with music that is - in the most literal and uncompromising sense of the word - baroque. Andrew Johnstone
Diaghilev and the Red Shoes at the National Concert Hall, Dublin
If Ballet Ireland wants to live up to its bold proclamation of being "the most exciting, stylish new member of the international ballet scene," it would do well to occasionally change Diaghilev's old red shoes for a pair that can navigate today's increasingly dynamic ballet world.
This performance of Diaghilev and the Red Shoes followed tradition in some instances, but other re-interpretations of the classics involved real mis-steps.
Throughout history, ballet has transformed the way its audiences considered movement, and directors since Diaghilev have challenged dancers to jump higher, turn faster and interpret complex music rhythmically, and with passion. Exceptional ballet suggests another realm of possibility, but little appeared transformative in Ballet Ireland's production of Diaghilev and the Red Shoes, other than guest artist Kathrin Czerny's believable interpretation of the Dying Swan, and the company's accurate evocation of Les Sylphides, complete with long, white tutus and ethereal atmosphere to pianist Archie Chen's steady - though rigid - accompaniment.
The first six ballets on the programme (Les Sylphides, The Red Shoes, Le Spectre de la Rose, Dying Swan, L'Apres - Midi d'un Faune and Gopak) showed an understanding of classical ballet, with guest artists Czerny and Mihael Sosnovschi providing the strongest performances. As a young choreographer, Morgann Runacre-Temple shows promise, though her interpretation of Le Spectre de la Rose needed fewer props and simpler costumes.
But the final dance on the programme, Gunther Falusy's Le Sacre du Printemps, proved shockingly disappointing with its outdated costumes and wigs, and repetitive, uninteresting choreography. Although the ballet made musical and theatrical history when it premiered in Paris in 1913, with its Russian pagan theme to Stravinsky's startling, beautiful score, Falusy provided nothing memorable in his version, other than a feeling of being lost in some netherworld between Diaghilev's time and today's vibrant ballet world. Continues on tour throughout Ireland. Christie Taylor
Holzmair, Vignoles at Imma, Dublin
Mahler, Bartók, Brahms, Janácek
Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair extracted a rich diversity from the apparent unity of his programme of songs at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Unity came courtesy of a common denominator: folksong. His selection was further unified by time - the songs date from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s - and geography, with all the original folk material coming from three near-neighbours: Germany, Moravia, and Hungary.
The recital's diversity sprang from the varied approaches of the four composers. The first half was devoted to Mahler, mostly settings of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the collection of German folksong poetry made famous in Mahler's orchestral arrangements and by the way they crop up in his symphonies. Holzmair subtly acknowledged Mahler's pinches of humour, often rather bitter, which is at odds with the poems' often sentimental celebration of love and nature.
In the six songs from his 49 deutsche Volkslieder, Brahms makes the most of that sentiment without ever veering into the mawkish. The music underlines the frequent resonance between emotion and the natural landscape, something captured by Holzmair who achieved his most fluent melding of voice and music with songs in his native German.
Bartók, who had thought he was acquainted with Hungarian folk song, stumbled on the real thing only in 1905. His settings revel in new harmonic ideas taken from the ancient scales preserved in the fast-disappearing songs which he sought and recorded in their thousands.
Typically, Holzmair's performance was a masterful marriage of warm, distinctively unfussy singing and deep intelligence. Not all of his voice's character and subtlety could be heard to best advantage in the open acoustic of IMMA's Great Hall, however. Yet his delivery was bright and animated, bringing vividly to life the little narratives so common in folksong.
Also entering full-tilt into the afternoon's stories and dramas was pianist Roger Vignoles, whose adept management of the acoustic ensured an equal musical partnership with a perfectly measured bias toward the singer. Michael Dungan
