Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a number of recent events in the arts world

Collins, Cór na nÓg, RTÉ NSO/Brophy

NCH, Dublin

The third of this year’s RTÉ Horizons concerts generated a memorably bright and upbeat atmosphere. The selection of contemporary works by featured composer Elaine Agnew took in some challenging enough listening but what made it especially engaging was the range of colour and the zestful delivery.

In his dual role of limber conductor and unceremonious compère, David Brophy found time for pithy yet insightful interviews on the creative processes with the composer and with solo pianist Finghin Collins.

Agnew's programme had assigned some doughtily virtuosic items to Collins which he brought off in heroic style. Stephen Gardner's heavy-duty tonescape The Shipyard(2002) tackled its Belfast subject with some of the grittier resources of mainstream modernism, while three of the Displaced Dances(2000) by Soviet-born Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin sugared a pill of grim realism with foot-tapping appeal.

Kats-Chernin has become Agnew's guiding spirit in recent years, and that might partly explain the eclectic approachability of Make a Wish, which Agnew composed last year to mark the 10th anniversary of RTÉ Lyric FM.

This work may be predicated on innocent thoughts of birthday cake, but more complex elements emerge from the systematic tonal language, the well-proportioned melodies and figurations, and the effective, economical orchestration.

Two further pieces of Agnew's both dated from 2000, yet offered such stylistic contrasts that each might have been taken for the work of a different composer. Owing its origins to an educational project with Charlotte Cory at Mercy Primary School, Belfast, the pervasively diatonic Wait and Seeproved a tour de force of memorisation and sustained accuracy for the buoyant young voices of RTÉ Cór na nÓg. And with Straight to the Point, Brophy's reading happily brought out a fierce individuality in the score. - ANDREW JOHNSTONE

Project Arts Centre

Some cognitive scientists believe that we think in narratives and that our brains make sense of different experiences through a stock-pile of stories. Maybe that’s why the five solos by Deborah Hay presented by The Genesis Project are so compelling.

Her choreography quietly demands a different way of watching and thinking: there’s no form to settle into, no references to “get” or allusions to file away for the denouement. Instead, moment follows fascinating moment in a seemingly illogical but highly authentic and satisfying manner.

This balance between surprise and authenticity is achieved not by free-range improvisation, but the discipline of three months of daily practice. Ella Clarke, Cindy Cummings, Emma Fitzgerald, Julie Lockett and Áine Stapleton have, between them, more than 30 years of experience interpreting Hay’s dance scores and their excellent performances were delivered with a quiet intensity.

Each work was shaded with the dancers’ individual personalities. In turn, the audience responded with both quiet concentration and giggles – Hay is notoriously witty.

Director Jason Byrne's informal setting, with benches on three sides, and Sarah-Jane Shiels' lighting – from moody crepuscular to blinding flashes – provided a well-struck balance between informality and theatricality. - MICHAEL SEAVER

McNamara, Mayers

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

A soldier wipes the fresh blood from his sword on the mane of his horse which then “gallops on with red hooves”. Another laments “the tedious peace” and serenades his idle sword, reminiscing about how, “in the foaming new wine”, he would exhort his “thirsty blade” to “drink deep, and taste from heart to heart”.

Pretty graphic for a Sunday matinee! Limerick-born, Berlin-based tenor Paul McNamara presented a recital of German Lieder on martial themes, with five songs on nuptial and domestic ones as a brief respite from the slaughter and mayhem.

The grisly sampling above is from Schumann's Vier Husarenlieder("Five Hussar Songs"), settings of poems by his contemporary Nikolaus Lenau. Neither of these romantic artists was ever a soldier, so that ignorance is probably what allowed them to celebrate the battlefield with an ecstasy and fantasy totally alien, even repulsive, to 21st century sensibilities.

Oh, for a bit of context! However, the spoken introduction remains an exception to the tradition of classical concerts here, and McNamara and pianist Philip Mayers were determined that we in the audience figure things out for ourselves. If there was no hint of irony in Schumann’s joyous, gallumphing piano accompaniment to Lenau’s “Hurrah for the hussar! What’s danger to him? His dearest sweetheart” – a sentiment that not even a defence forces recruiting office would employ – then perhaps was there an ironic twinkle in McNamara’s eye? He’s well capable.

I don't think so. The drama of Wagner is his bread and butter, so that he fully and easily inhabited the conceits of his chosen songs. He sang with his customary expressive clarity, full of blood-lust and heroism, or perversely tender, as in the soldier's serenade to his sword in Der liedige Frieden(The Tedious Peace). - MICHAEL DUNGAN