Reviews

The Irish Timesreviews Chris DeBurgh at the Gaiety in Dublin and Mary Dullea (piano) at the NCH in Dublin

Chris de Burgh

Gaiety Theatre

The stage lights flare and crackle like an electrical storm. Music swells and surges in a crescendo of anticipation. It is an introduction worthy of the second coming, or perhaps the moment in a sci-fi movie when the spaceship door finally opens. Instead, though, a small man appears in suit trousers and a white shirt, giving a little wave, like a businessman happy to have finished a long day of conference calls.

This man is Chris de Burgh. You may have heard of him. The name alone summons a rush of associations, some of which carry a shudder, few of which fail to draw a smile. There is that warbly tenor, the calling card of the mawkish balladeer (“I have never seen that dress you’re wearing . . . ”) which switches at the faintest invitation into a throaty belt: “DON’T PAY THE FERRYMAN!” There is that haircut, long at the back and wispy up front, entirely unruffled by 34 years in the music biz.

And of course there is that cringe factor, unalleviated by the man’s apparent earnestness: his slightly tarnished squeaky clean persona, his claims to heal people with his hands, his indelible association with a time of shoulder pads and enormous hair. In short, it’s easy to snigger at de Burgh. But while he certainly gives us some reason - “I often wonder where religion came from,” goes one introduction, as though he is considering starting one - any embarrassment we feel says more about us than him.

In a set piled high with oldies - Missing You, Spanish Train, Sailing Away, each delivered with cheesy synths and clean guitars - even the newies are throwbacks, cover versions culled from his latest album, Footsteps.What de Burgh brings to Turn, Turn, Turn, All Along TheWatchtoweror The Long and Winding Roadis not easy to fathom - everything is transformed into the same MOR mulch.

Nonetheless, de Burgh will routinely pause the show and step forward to bask in his applause. "You have no idea how it feels to stand here, with all this love coming this way," he tells us. Returning the favour, presumably, he departs the stage for Lady in Red, invading boxes and draping himself over audience members, some of whom have worn red for the occasion. Certain toes will never uncurl after this experience, but it is almost admirable how unaltered de Burgh has remained by the flow of time. You may have grown out of seeking epic significance in the portentous verses of Spanish Train, you may greet Patricia The Stripperwith the same mortification as a faded photo of yourself. This is because you've changed. Chris de Burgh has not. PETER CRAWLEY

Mary Dullea (piano)

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

Joe Cutler - Clavinova Music. Frank Lyons - TEASE. Pawel Szymanski - Two Studies. George Crumb - A Little Suite for Christmas AD 1979. Dai Fujikura - mormoro. Jo Kondo - Short Summer Dance. Nancarrow - Sonatina

Cork pianist Mary Dullea, a specialist in new music, is “researching, commissioning, performing and recording works for the piano that incorporate the use of the inside and the outside of the instrument”. Her recital at the John Field Room, the first concert in this year’s Music21 series, offered a cross-section of works highlighting her current preoccupation.

The most unusual element was in fact a non-musical one, the projection of videos by Julia Bardsley, whose contributions were radical for their restraint. She projected images of the actual score (for Joe Cutler’s Clavinova Music), watery lights (Conlon Nancarrow’s Sonatina), and, elsewhere, calm, almost fetishistic images of parts of an actual piano. As a combination of music and image, it constituted an interesting alternative to the more active and intrusive norm.

The actual music included works with and without electronics, and ones that needed hands only on the keyboard as well as others which had them working directly on the strings or instrument case. Joe Cutler’s Clavinova Music was like kind of 21st-century liberation of the 18th-century idea of the Alberti bass (though it began at the top of the keyboard rather than the bottom). Frank Lyons’s TEASE added lightly-touched electronic finishes to directly hand-muted sounds. Dai Fujikura’s mormoro had a more skittish relationship between electronics and piano before reaching a violent end, and Jo Kondo’s Short Summer Dance also sounded playful.

The best-known work was A Little Suite for Christmas, AD 1979 by George Crumb, a composer whose name has become almost synonymous with extended performing techniques. More striking now than the skilful exploratory sonorities are the echoes of Messiaen.

Dullea ended each half with works restricting themselves to normal pianistic behaviour, Pawel Szymanski’s Two Studies, which take an almost Scarlattian delight in finger dexterity.

The early Sonatina by Conlon Nancarrow, a man who would devote most of his life to works for player piano, shows his trademark obsessions with rhythmic intricacy and percussive attack, with a spoonful of blues.

Dullea played everything in her well-chosen programme with sure, communicative skill. MICHAEL DERVAN

The Music21 Series continues at lunchtime tomorrow