Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review events around the country this week

Argerich, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Dutoit

NCH, Dublin

MICHAEL DERVAN

Prokofiev – Love for Three Oranges Suite. Piano Concerto No 3. Romeo and Juliet Suite.

It’s not just in his music that Prokofiev was colourful. He dressed that way, too. The great pianist Sviatoslav Richter once saw him in the street “wearing bright yellow shoes and a check suit with an orange-red tie”. The effects must have worked. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich remembers the composer for the “neatness and elegance of his personal appearance and dress”.

Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit is a man known for his musical elegance, and his conducting of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the National Concert Hall was a model of good taste in an all-Prokofiev programme that included works that have tempted many interpreters to varying degrees of excess.

Dutoit did not by any means dilute the composer's moments of grinding dissonance (in the Montagues and Capuletsfrom Romeo and Juliet, for instance) or the splashes of fashionable 1920s acid in the Love for Three Oranges Suite.

The exactness of Dutoit's ear, the precision of his colouring, and his judicious weighting of harmony brought out the best in both the tangy Love for Three Orangesmusic and in his own compilation of numbers from the first two suites that Prokofiev extracted from that most tune-rich of 20th-century ballets, Romeo and Juliet.

For many in the audience, I suspect, the main attraction was neither Prokofiev nor Dutoit, but the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich, returning to Dublin after an all-too-long absence.

In Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, Argerich commanded the keyboard like a balletic force of nature, eternally energised and unflagging, adroit in the tightest of manoeuvres, her hands moving as if liberated from the constraints of gravity, he whole demeanour focused as if nothing else were in her vision but the making of the music.

By comparison with Alexander Toradze, who played the same piece with the RTÉ NSO on Friday, she showed an abundance of grace, and transitioned freely between the music’s moments of grit and wit. She’s long been celebrated for her performances of this particular piece, and even now, in her late 60s, she still seems its full mistress.

Dutoit and the players of the RPO were hand-in-glove partners in this spirit-lifting performance.

Confessions of an Irish Publican

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

MARY LELAND

In his curtain speech at the end of this performance Des Keogh thanks the late playwright John B Keane for leaving such a legacy of theatrical opportunity to the acting community.

On this evidence, however, perhaps Keogh should think again. Admittedly, as with other letters or confessions from the same writer, this has been adapted by Keogh in an effort to make workable material out of very plain prose, and one has to remember that no one forced the actor to make some kind of hay from the writer’s lighter moments.

The blame, like the praise, has to be shared for this production of the Irish Repertory Theatre of New York, amiably directed by Charlotte Moore.

That said, Keogh delivers enough of the goods to keep the audience entertained and appreciative with his inimitable style and professional poise as he presents the letters written by publican Martin MacMeer to his friend Dan, telling of his own romantic delusions, the doings of other people in the parish and of other customers of the Journey’s End pub, along with the man-eating solicitor from Dublin 4 (of course!) with her eye on Martin.

The adaptation keeps these several strands of what passes for a plot together, with each role played with a gusto typical of Keogh. Yet all of these – from parish priest to mother superior and several others in between – are such strident stereotypes that only Keane, and now Keogh, would have the nerve to offer them to a modern audience, knowing well that a modern audience can feel perfectly at home with caricature of the most servile kind.

It seems also to be true that Keane’s crude rustic earthiness – some might call it salaciousness – finds a welcome in Irish hearts, and Keogh, like Keane, makes certain that there is not a meaning that is not doubled.

It is Keogh himself who redeems what is worthy in this piece, playing with his own trademark quality of connection, and although his use of the letterbook on which the play is based suggests a dependence on the script, even this suspicion cannot detract from a performance that is at all times wholehearted.

Until Sat, then tours