Reviews

Irish Times critics review the latest from the world of arts

Jon Balke
Whelans,
Dublin

The penultimate concert in the Improvised Music Company's year-long ECM series brought Jon Balke's Magnetic North Orchestra to this country for the first time. Sponsored by Pierce Associates Architects, the visit produced a memorable evening's music by one of the most creative ensembles heard here in quite a while.

Pianist, composer and orchestrator, Balke has been and continues to be a major innovator on the Nordic and international jazz scenes.

The composition of the group echoes that diversity. Balke, tenor saxophonist Fredrik Lundin and trumpeter/vocalist Per Jorgensen come from the jazz world, violinist Bjarte Erke and viola player and violinist Milos Valente are classical musicians, while his remarkable percussionists, Helge Norbakken and Ingar Zach, reveal a whole range of influences, extending over North-African and Far-Eastern rhythmic and instrumental textures.

But this band is more than the sum of its musical diversity. Very much the creation of the gifted Balke, their music is simultaneously loose and rigorously controlled, very formal, yet remarkably free, tightly arranged, yet full of impressive and seemingly off-the-cuff interplay.

In the process it draws on a striking range of sounds and textures, especially from Balke's occasional use of dampened strings to produce quarter tones and other sounds, and the two percussionists, who employ their array of instruments in a hugely inventive way, making their function as much textural as rhythmic. It's a music full of surprise, yet each piece retains a sense of organic development and wholeness.

Although Balke hardly identified any of the pieces played - the first collection of pieces was a continuous medley of "maybe eight tunes" he said - much of the material was drawn from his Diverted Travels ECM CD released last year. And the band's performance of it was arresting in its precision, relaxation and its ability to get inside the notes and turn them into a thing of beauty.

In what is above all an ensemble music, it's perhaps invidious to mention one musician in particular. But Per Jorgensen is rather special. A fine trumpeter who can swing, play free and solo with equal aplomb and inventiveness. Yet when he turns to wordless vocalising, or what used to be called scat singing in jazz, he brings another dimension to the group's sounds and textures.

Imaginatively and passionately declaimed, his vocalising seems to draw on an Arabic tradition. It's a serious, committed and somehow deeply spiritual sound - in itself not a bad capsule description of the MNO.

Ray Comiskey

OSC/Douglas
NCH,
Dublin
Beethoven - Piano Concertos 3 & 5 (Emperor)

Maxim Vengerov and the Irish Chamber Orchestra's all-Beethoven concert at the National Concert Hall on Monday was followed by Barry Douglas and the Orchestra of St Cecilia in a series that will present all seven of Beethoven's concertos.

Douglas is directing the piano concertos from the keyboard. Catherine Leonard will play the Violin Concerto on Monday 28th, when cellist Guy Johnston will join pianist and violinist for the Triple Concerto.

The differences between Douglas's second instalment on Thursday - the Third and Fifth Piano Concertos - and the ICO's concerto performance with Vengerov could hardly have been more pronounced.

Vengerov chose an extraordinary leisurely tempo for the opening of the Violin Concerto, a tempo so extreme that it posed conductor Garry Walker with sometimes insurmountable musical challenges.

Walker drew playing of high refinement from the ICO and made a number of valiant efforts to imbue the orchestra's contribution with a momentum and tension that the solo playing simply lacked. Ultimately, however, the slowness of the first movement served to undermine the work's genuine slow movement, and the effect of normal musical discourse was only achieved in the finale.

Douglas's tempos were, by contrast, sensible and effective throughout, and it was the piano which was the major driving force. Indeed, the solo playing was imbued with the kind of thrust that could have cut through the full tone of a large symphony orchestra.

Faced with the chamber-sized OSC which, even at its most vital, does not come remotely near the finish, clarity and sheer adaptability of the ICO, the piano tended to dominate, even at moments where the orchestra had the more important material.

Yet, in spite of the fact that Douglas's chosen balances were often reminiscent of those 1950s mono concerto recordings where giant, close-focus soloists dominated over distant, pygmy orchestras, his gripping performances were actually the more reliable in communicating the core values of the music.

Michael Dervan

Psycho Beach Party
Old Museum Arts Centre,
Belfast

Over the past five years, Belfast's Rawlife company has chosen an intriguing mix of plays through which to deliver its aim of encouraging the uninitiated to take a risk on theatre. Coming after titles like Miss Julie, The Glass Menagerie and The Clockwork Orange, it is difficult to understand what prompted the choice of Charles Busch's cheesy American spoof, set among the beach bums and California girls of 1960s Malibu and here receiving its Irish premiere. The play and its themes are as jumbled as the multiple personalities which people it, a hideous community of social and sexual misfits, narcissistic obsessives and wannabe celebrities.

Other than through Niall Rea's colourful hand-painted set and jangling guitar music, composed and played live by Phil Vernon, there is little sense of the hedonistic, sun-soaked world of the west-coast surfers. Director Lyn Harris goes for broke in her response to Busch's raucous send-up of the classic B-movie genre, and the six-strong cast works hard to engage our humour, but the cliche-ridden dialogue and two-dimensional characters scarcely reward their collective effort. While not ideally cast, Antoinette Morelli gives a fluent and engaging performance as the wise, intellectually astute Berdine, while Martin McCann displays his growing versatility as sweet, skittish Chicklet Forrest and all her alter egos.

Jane Coyle