Reviews

Reviews of The Girls of Summer: A Lunchtime Cabaret,  in Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Dublin and Talbot, Du, Hakenen, Sweeneyin St Michael's Church, Dún Laoghaire

The Girls of Summer: A Lunchtime Cabaret

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

CABARET SINGERS are like foxes or fireflies – they mostly come out at night.

This is not a point lost on Susannah De Wrixon, whose new cabaret show takes place, stubbornly, in the early afternoon with whatever sunlight August has to offer peeking into Bewley’s Cafe Theatre like a killer through the curtains.

When De Wrixon reaches Noël Coward's The Party's Over Now, a natural kiss-off for a musical revue which announces the time for "little boys and girls to hurry home to bed", she smuggles in a couple of alternatives: "or work, or shopping". Such is the gentle appeal of her show, The Girls of Summer, something unapologetically theatrical and wittily self-effacing.

Elegant and unfussy, De Wrixon works with director Sue Mythen to present herself as a dressed-down diva, a plainclothes chanteuse unwilling to slow the music with banter or explanation.

The songs, she tells us, should be able to explain themselves and so they do; bittersweet memories, delicate distractions, amusing ditties and misty reveries that follow each other like pearls on a string.

De Wrixon's voice is a clear, gossamer instrument, and while Donal O'Shea supplies precise accompaniment on piano (capably replacing the advertised Conor Linehan), she is seldom more affecting than on an a capella version of Tom's Dinerby Suzanne Vega.

The song we know is a drifting pop number of half-formed observations through a window, full of suggestions but dissolving routinely into a chorus of “do do dos”.

De Wrixon loses that sing-song refrain, knowing her dos from her don’ts, and instead turns the song into a discreet performance piece, letting her face fill in the blanks.

It’s maybe the most surprising and successful inclusion in a set that deploys arch comic set pieces along with the time-honoured poignancy of Irving Berlin, Randy Newman and Kurt Weill, and finds both seams in several Sondheim numbers.

Each composer is served with admirable control and effortless sensitivity, but her performance of Meter Man, by Rosaleen Linehan and Roisin Sheerin, allies her with a more slyly affecting and distinctly Irish comic tradition.

Mingling its throwaway jokes with the ache of unresolved attraction, that delicate appeal works nicely anytime, day or night. Runs until September 5th PETER CRAWLEY

Talbot, Du, Hakenen, Sweeney

St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire

Bach– Concerto in G BWV592. Handel– O qualis de coelo sonus. Bach– Passacaglia in C minor BWV582. Handel– Gloria

THERE WAS an audience four or five times the normal size at this week’s instalment in St Michael’s summer-long organ recital series.

The featured organist was Peter Sweeney, who was joined by soprano Rachel Talbot and a small ensemble.

Sweeney opened the Bach portion of his programme with the Concerto in G (BWV 592), transcribed from a little violin concerto by a member of the Ernst family, Bach’s employers in Weimar. Bach worked valiantly – mostly by filling out the left-hand harmony – to elevate what was harmless but rather bland and very simple resource material.

Offering gigantic contrast was the great Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582). Although here, as in the concerto, there were minor slips, Sweeney navigated the ever-increasing complexity of the work’s 20 variations to arrive at an emphatic concluding climax.

Two pieces with soprano were presented in honour of the 250th anniversary this year of the death of Handel: the short, six- movement motet O qualis de coelo sonusand the Gloriadiscovered only in 2001 in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Rachel Talbot leavened her usual sweet-toned timbre with more vibrato than usual, although not in gracefully evolving long notes in the motet or in delicate high ones in the Gloria.She was unfazed by Handel's florid lines in quick movements and overall, there was more of pace and agility than of narrative animation.

Apart from the occasional lapse of ensemble, the student violinists Rachel Du and Elina Hakenen proved good music-makers with Sweeney in accompaniment. They were joined for the Gloriaby Sweeney's son Richard, a lutenist who plays theorbo on the work's world premiere recording on BIS.

Sadly, no texts or translations were provided, nor were there any printed or spoken introductions to any of the works. The presumptions this implies about audiences help perpetuate the perception that organists form a musical community interested mostly in playing to itself. MICHAEL DUNGAN