Reviews

Irish Times writers give their verdicts.

Collins, Wexford Festival Chorus and Singers, Cracow PO/Larkin

Rowe St Church, Wexford

Tippett - A Child of Our Time. Beethoven - Choral Fantasy Op 80.

Saturday's concert by resident artists of the Wexford Festival and guest pianist Finghin Collins paired works by two intensely individual composers.

Tippett's theme is pacifism, Beethoven's harmony. Yet for both, the words are a peg to hang the music on - and the music says it all.

As you'd expect at a festival where top voices are a sine qua non, the line-up of soloists was conspicuously strong. Though Emily Pulley (soprano) and Simon O'Neill (tenor) seemed less than convinced by some aspects of Tippett's own makeshift but pithy libretto, D'Arcy Bleiker (bass) delivered his recitatives with bardic authority, while a poised and meticulous Anna Burford (mezzo soprano) shone through the obscurities more brightly still.

Standing in at short notice for Wexford's artistic director David Agler - who has been diverted to other tasks by the untimely death of the festival's chief executive Jerome Hynes - was American conductor Christopher Larkin.

With safe tempos, moderate articulations, and a certain blandness of dynamics, his realisation of Tippett's forbidding score was staunch rather than subtle.

Rarely did the 90-strong pro-am chorus seem daunted by their unpredictable and expressionistic parts. And while even the loudest solo and chorus singing could be lost in a blaze of brass, none of this detracted from the music's immense emotional impact.

To follow the dark and serious A Child of Our Time with Beethoven's show-stopper for piano, orchestra and chorus proved a master-stroke of programming.

In the introductory cadenza, Collins turned the mood with exactly the right blend of solemnity and good humour. Nor was there any hint of the meretricious in his clear and urbane contributions to the ensuing variations and hymn.

After Tippett's bleak depiction of the state of the world, this was a performance that made Beethoven's optimism all the more irresistibly uplifting.

Andrew Johnstone

Dave Binney's Welcome To Life

Whelan's, Dublin

Whelan's was full to capacity for Saturday night's visit of Dave Binney's "Welcome To Life" sextet - Binney (alto), Mark Turner (tenor), Adam Rogers (guitar), Craig Taborn (piano), Scott Colley (bass) and Brian Blade (drums). Organised by The Improvised Music Company, the visit of this New York-based ensemble was an opportunity to hear a band which, even by the standards of the Big Apple, is a formidable unit.

Although Binney didn't identify any items played, all of the material, composed by him, came from the band's eponymous CD, released early last year and made by the same group with Chris Potter instead of Mark Turner in on tenor. So it was particularly instructive to see how they handled such pieces as Soldifolier, Welcome To Life, Lisliel, Our Time Together, Sintra, Enchantress, California and the rest, having played them throughout their current tour.

The head arrangements remain, as well as arranged episodes within each performance, making well-judged use of various devices to colour the textures; unison and harmonised lines, counterpoint, canon, rhythm changes.

But when it came to soloing, the improvisations were handled with astonishing freedom and invention, especially by Binney, Rogers and Taborn (despite the fact that he had fewer solo opportunities than might have been expected). The result was performances stretched adventurously, well beyond the limits set on the band's CD.

Binney hasn't a notably beautiful or expressively malleable tone, and his improvisations tend to stand or fall by their qualities of line and the intensity and sense of light and shade with which they're conveyed. An arresting player, he simply grew more authoritative as the evening progressed, culminating in a remarkable solo on California.

Turner, great player that he is, brings a different, less assertive dynamic to the band than Potter. To these ears he was overshadowed by both Binney and Rogers, with the guitarist's wealth of ideas and mastery of tone and technique making him perhaps the most interesting soloist of all, although enough was heard of Taborn (and Colley) to suggest they would run him close.

But it was the overall impact of the band which mattered most. Driven by the amazing Brian Blade, a force of nature and sublime inventiveness on drums, the sextet moved fluently through the varied dimensions of each composition, changing tempo and time signature with aplomb, always alert to the dynamics of the subtle interchanges going on within each performance.

And, in its edgy, upfront intensity, it provided a glimpse of how New York's finest are addressing questions of form and freedom in jazz deeply rooted in American traditions.

Ray Comiskey

Novemberfest

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

There were recurring themes and motifs running through this mini fest of dance and physical theatre. Memory and loss and a yearning for what was or might have been made their mark on several of the offerings which originated from Canada, Finland, Ireland and Britain in the second year of this autumnal festival at the Pavilion Theatre.

First up were Holy Body Tatoo, a Vancouver-based duo of performer/choreographers. Due to injury, Dana Gingras was not partnered by her fellow choreographer Noam Gagnon but by his fine replacement David Pressault.

Gingras's own solo Crave was perhaps the most intriguing of the three offerings, an internal dialogue that seemed to delve into a world of dark imaginings mirrored by primal movement but then stopped just when you were becoming absorbed. Running Wild was more of a signature piece, a fast-paced duet, teeming with perfectly-timed runs and falls , jerky challenging encounters and emotionally tender body-wrapping moves.

This work explored a symbiotic relationship that spoke of tenderness and challenge, of stillness and restless abandon. The mood could switch from basic need to elaborate desire as a clinging wrist on ankle, would be followed by cradled head move and then suddenly flick into a tailspin inverting the body totally.

This challenging and playful tone was underlining the presentation by Irish company BDNC for their work in progress which attempted to bring choreographic encounters into the kitchen in the aptly-named Two for dinner for two. A recipe for disaster perhaps, as the knives were out in every sense.

The clarinet and voice which counterpointed the celery chopping and splicing were the collaborative element of Jane O'Leary and the Concorde Ensemble and to date are providing the essential spice and real cutting edge.

Relationships of the familial kind were echoed in two of the other works. Ingrid Nachstern's bow-tie like Chion drew on the recent death of the choreographer's father and a similar loss and act of remembering was excellently evoked in Absence and Presence by Andrew Dawson. This was a tender, elegiac musing on the tragic death of the performer/choreographer's father which received its Irish premiere at this festival. Weaving video and movement, dance and mime and the spoken fragments from their last letters, Andrew Dawson fashioned with a deftness and a lightness of touch an exploration of the ways of father and son.

Seona Mac Réamoinn

Jovanovic, RTÉ NSO/Mercier.

NCH, Dublin

Dukas - La Péri. Messiaen - Poèmes pour Mi. Schmitt - La tragédie de Salomé.

Friday's concert by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under visiting French conductor Jacques Mercier offered three rarely-played French works in a single programme.

Paul Dukas (1865-1935) and his pupil Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) are both well-known figures.

But only one work in Dukas's small output (the extremely popular Sorcerer's Apprentice) is at all familiar in the concert hall.

Dukas's ballet La Péri, exotically perfumed in the Russian manner and orchestrated with great refinement, languishes in relative obscurity. And the songs of Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi, a musical celebration of marriage written for his first wife Claire Delbos are also but infrequentlyheard.

La Péri was first heard on April 22nd, 1912, in a programme that also included La Tragédie de Salomée by Florent Schmitt (1870-1958), a ballet that began life in 1907, the year in which Strauss's opera Salomé was also premiéred.

Schmitt's work is now usually heard, when it is heard at all, in a later and orchestrally lusher version from 1910.

Mercier's handling of the Dukas had many exquisite touches of colour and expressive detail.

The delivery was especially fine in the opening brass fanfare, and later when he had the orchestra moving, as it were, on tiptoes.

But he failed to rescue the piece from the dangerous recursiveness of its material.

Serbian soprano Katarina Jovanovic sang the Messiaen songs, to the composer's own texts, exploring marriage as an intersection of the human and the divine, with clear focus and sometimes thrilling ardency.

But the balance between singer and orchestra often left a lot to be desired, with Mercier allowing the singer to be masked by the superior weight of the instrumental mass.

In this concert, it was the Schmitt, performed with a choral contribution from the ladies of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir (the short soprano solo taken by Rebecca Ryan), which showed the strongest fibre.

The performance presented a piece that was convincing in its mood-painting, distinctive in character, and memorable in many of its musical gestures.

Michael Dervan

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast Festival

The year is 1981 and, in Britain, Thatcher's children are on the rampage. The rich grow richer and the poor are left to drown in their own misfortunes. Into this uncaring, upwardly mobile society sprang Sue Townsend's wonderful creation, Adrian Albert Mole, a spotty, pompous teenage intellectual and wannabe poet, whose best-selling fictional diaries would provide hours of fun and scathing social comment.

Under Lisa May's direction, Bruiser's cast of five run riot with Chris Ball's adaptation of Townsend's original script. James Doran, Laura Hughes, Simon Imrie and Sharon Morwood dash in and out of roles as Adrian's large, eccentric circle of family, friends, neighbours, playground bullies and domestic pets, all of them rotating around Jon Trenchard's outstanding performance as the little nerd himself.

Not only does Trenchard deliver all the best lines, but, as a former Oxford choral scholar, he has also re-arranged the complex score to a series of close harmony numbers, faultlessly sung a cappella by the tight-knit ensemble. With his tiny frame, large scholarly spectacles and irritatingly prissy voice, he reserves the sharpest of his scathing wit and extensive vocabulary for his observations of his rough diamond father, frustrated mother and her sex-obsessed lover, all of whom he clearly feels to be beneath him. It is through his relationships with his no-nonsense grandmother, a poverty-stricken war veteran and the gorgeous and brilliant Pandora Braithwaite, that Adrian will seek to achieve the dizzy heights of his self-styled annus mirabilis. Bruiser has crafted a hugely entertaining evening, in the distinctively expressionist style to which we have become accustomed.

Jane Coyle

Touring to Drogheda, Derry, Armagh, Monaghan, Limerick, Antrim, Lisburn, Downpatrick, Coleraine and Coalisland.

NCC/Holten

National Gallery, Dublin

Stenhammar - 3 Körvisor. Gösta Nystroem - Havets Hand. Sven-David Sandström - Hear my prayer, O Lord. Bo Holten - Rain and Rush and Rosebush. Palestrina - Missa Confitebor tibi Domine.

The National Chamber Choir's winter series, which opened under Danish conductor Bo Holten at the National Gallery on Thursday, has Audible Landscapes as its theme. The printed programme credits the theme to the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, though, strangely there is not a single work by Silvestrov in any of the programmes.

Thursday's repertoire tied in with the gallery's current exhibition of printmaking from Sweden, From Darkness Into Light, and opened with three rather homely and folksily jolly songs written at the age of 18 by Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927), the most important Swedish composer of the early 20th century. Many of the best-known works by Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966) were inspired by the sea, including the first of his 1956 Havsvisioner, Sea Visions, Havets Hand (The hand of the sea), a piece which moves in wave-like rolls of sonorously-swelling harmony.

Sven-David Sandström's Hear my prayer, O Lord (1986) takes Henry Purcell's piece of the same name as its starting point, literally, and morphs almost imperceptibly into a rich, late 20th century language that still relates to the emotional world of the original Purcell.

Conductor Bo Holten's own Rain and Rush and Rosebush (1991) sets words from Hans Christian Andersen's The Philosopher's Stone, painting the opposing characters represented in extremes of black and white.

The evening ended with a venture into the smooth perfection of Palestrina. The highlight of this performance of the Missa Confitebor tibi Domine was the reserve and calm of the closing Agnus Dei. But the highlight of the evening was the Sandström, a technical tour-de-force of composition and it left everything else rather in the shade.

Michael Dervan