Reviews

Recent heavy metal, opera and classical performances reveiwed

Judas Priest, Megadeth, Testament

O2

THE LIGHTS dim, an eerie synth sound echoes around the vast auditorium as a giant mural of the prophet Nostradamus displays a pair of demon eyes.

Lead singer Rob Halford emerges from a raised turret wreathed in dry ice, carrying a trident and wearing what can only be described as a giant roll of silver cling film.

As long as Judas Priest are around, heavy metal will never lose its reputation for bombast or self-parody.

The band still have the long hair and the twin guitar synchronised strut and it feels as if we’re partying like it’s 1980, the year that Judas Priest hit the big time with their album British Steel.

The new and well-received concept album Nostradamus is about the 16th century French seer who could predict the future, but Judas Priest’s set was all about the band’s storied past.

They opened with Dawn of Creation and Prophecy from Nostradamus, but the rest of their hour and a half long crowd-pleasing set was from their back catalogue as the band tore through standards like Metal Gods, Between the Hammer and the Anvil, The Hellion, Electric Eye, Painkiller and, of course, the incomparable Breaking the Law.

Judas Priest’s stage show was as much about theatre as it was about the music, but Megadeth’s was all about the music. Trash and conventional metal are not always easy bedfellows and many of the fans who just watched Judas Priest freaked out to Megadeth.

Ageless front man Dave Mustaine is that rare thing, a brilliant guitar player who can sing and has a gift for melody.

The sound was ropey at the beginning, but improved as the band hit their stride finishing on a real high with Peace Sells (But Who’s Buying), Symphony of Destruction and Holy Wars (The Punishment Due).

Megadeth were superb, Testament were loud, very loud, but their brand of generic trash metal went down well with the hardcore crowd. Heavy metal needs a big stage and good acoustics. The O2 is made for it. Just wait until AC/DC get a hold of the place.

RONAN McGREEVY

O’Conor, UO/Tovey

NCH, Dublin

Verdi – Force of Destiny Overture. Mozart – Piano Concerto in E flat.

K482. Tchaikovsky – Symphony No 4.

The Ulster Orchestra’s concert under Bramwell Tovey at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday began as it was to continue. Tovey took an in-your-face approach to Verdi’s Forza del Destino Overture, making sure at all times that the colours were vivid and the visceral impact high. In such an eventful piece, the promise of high drama to come was unmissable.

Without an actual 19th-century opera to follow, what could an 18th-century concerto achieve in its place? Tovey delivered a strong build-up at the beginning of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E flat, so much so that it almost seemed to promise rather more than the entry of the soloist would be able to deliver.

John O’Conor wisely ignored the implicit challenge. He offered carefully delimited piano playing of classical scale in a reading that embraced a range of tasteful embellishment and Tovey’s handling of the orchestral part brought out the full richness of Mozart’s extraordinary writing for wind instruments.

The conductor’s approach to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, dedicated to the composer’s patron Nadezhda von Meck and completed in the wake of his disastrous marriage, was full-on.

The limiting factors were an insufficiency of contrast, and a certain stiffness of gait, which often prevented the music from flexing or breathing naturally.

However, the emotional charge was high, and when the straitjacketing relaxed, as in the quiet melancholy at the end of the second movement, the music making temporarily moved on to a higher and far more rewarding plane.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Kliegel, RTÉ NSO/Markson

NCH, Dublin

Haydn – Symphony No 102. Schumann – Cello Concerto. Mendelssohn – Italian Symphony No 4.

Friday’s RTÉ NSO programme of Haydn, Schumann and Mendelssohn looked so mainstream that you would be forgiven for thinking it the kind of programme least likely to challenge the orchestra and its principal conductor, Gerhard Markson.

Markson, however, has long shown himself to be the kind of musician who is stimulated rather than daunted by the scale of a challenge.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Gerald Barry’s Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Strauss’s Elektra have proved to be the kind of pieces to bring out the best in him.

Friday’s familiar offerings produced instead a style of playing that had more than a hint of the routine about it.

There was a foggy clutter in the Haydn which prevented the full emergence of the composer’s natural joie de vivre, and masked the sense of the great symphonic master’s pleasure in his own inimitable skills of musical construction.

Haydn doesn’t deserve to sound as dull as this.

Maria Kliegel, the soloist in Schumann’s cello concerto, is a player with a gorgeous tone. Her sound is easy, full, and often effortless-seeming. But Schumann’s concerto is a difficult nut to crack, particularly in the pacing of the first movement, which, with its strange shifts of manner, can sound like two separate pieces awkwardly intercut to form one.

This movement really needs a player with a kind of supercharged lyricism if the contrast between the rambling reach of the solo lines and the tauter energy of the orchestral tuttis is to be meaningfully bridged.

Kliegel was more successful in the calm of the central slow movement, and brought fire and energy to the finale.

The closing performance of Mendelssohn’s sunny Italian Symphony was a middle-of-the-road affair until the finale, where Markson and his players became energised by the thrills of co-ordinating the demanding Saltarello at speed. Here the music making at last moved up a few levels in pointedness of delivery.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Opera Theatre Company

O’Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin

Handel – Xerxes.

Handel’s opera Serse (or Xerxes as it is known in English translation), which ran for just five performances at its first production in 1738, is famous well beyond the world of opera.

The fame stems from instrumental arrangements of the opening aria, widely known as Handel’s Largo (although the aria itself is marked Larghetto), and the opera traces complications of amatory intrigue and deceit surrounding the Persian king, Xerxes.

Opera Theatre Company’s new production, updating the piece to Napoleonic times, is of the kind that strips the work bare.

This is less a matter of the admittedly spare production (directed by Michael Moxham and designed by Sarah Bacon) than of the musical side of the evening.

There’s no chorus and the orchestra is stripped of wind and brass, and reduced to just five players – string quartet and harpsichord – without even a double bass.

At the opening night,

in the O’Reilly Theatre on Saturday, the instrumental playing, directed from the harpsichord by Andrew Synnott, was often private, self-centred even, as if the musicians were involved in anything but the heightened emotional specifics of opera.

The sense of rapport with the singers was extremely limited, musical drive was almost completely absent, and the specific import of the words, both in recitative and in the arias, was often lost.

Most of the singers did find moments when they transcended the evening’s feeble heartbeat. Mezzo soprano Imelda Drumm’s vocally sure Xerxes frequently set about winding up the tension, though not without moments of unnecessary flouncing.

Soprano Natasha Jouhl’s Romilda (the object of the king’s affections) showed a more consistent engagement, and there were moments when the Amastris of mezzo soprano Allison Cook suggested real potential.

Counter tenor Mark Chambers’s Arsamenes followed a path of light-toned, even-tempered musicianship, and baritone Brendan Collins made the most of the role of the comic servant Elviro.

The single most impressive moment came from the Ariodates of baritone Giles Davies, who briefly showed how a determined singer, standing and delivering, can become a dominating musical force, and bring words and music into sharp focus.

On tour until March 7th

MICHAEL DERVAN