Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events

Vogler Spring Festival

St Columba’s Church, Drumcliffe

Sligo’s tenth highly successful, high-calibre annual chamber music festival opened with announcements concerning the event’s future. When I arrived at the four-day festival’s midway point, audiences were still digesting the news that Barry Douglas would be the artistic director for 2010 and arguing about the likeliest new names for the event now that the current artistic director, violinist Frank Reinecke of the eponymous Vogler String Quartet, has completed his five-year term. Reckon on the inclusion of the word “Sligo”, given the town’s and county’s brave and pioneering commitment to establishing the Voglers as ensemble-in-residence (1999-2004) and to supporting the festival from the start.

The 2009 programming could be described as either focused or conservative, depending on your point of view. The nine concerts included single works by Haydn, Beethoven (with some folk-song arrangements), Reger and Webern, three contemporary works, and a late-night concert of arrangements by the Rastrelli Cello Quartet. Otherwise, all the music was confined to the 70 years between 1826 and 1896.

This concentration on the Romantic mainstream – represented here chiefly by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Dvorák – still produced vast contrasts, sometimes within the same concert.

For example, even though Irish pianist Sophie Cashell's pieces by Mendelssohn and Schumann were from the same year, 1835, they may as well have come from different planets. Her selections from Mendelssohn's Songs Without Wordswere delicate, self-contained, single-conceit miniatures, while Schumann's Carnavalis a half-hour stream of consciousness laced with bipolar tensions, far-flung inspirations and unsolved mysteries.

To this huge contrast – and also to the tightrope between baroque and Romantic in Mendelssohn's Bach-inspired F minor Prelude and Fugue, Op 35 – the 20-year-old Cashell brought the kind of fresh, enraptured engagement coupled with seemingly effortless execution that shot her to international fame in 2007 when she won BBC television's Classical Starseries.

Cashell was also involved with two of the festival's three contemporary works, finding a slightly mischievous mood in Philip Martin's sometimes jazz-influenced, sometimes bi-tonal Variations on Irish Airsfor solo piano from 1980. And in Seóirse Bodley's Earlsfort Suite(2000) – settings of poems by Micheal O'Siadhail – she proved a sensitive and attentive accompanist to soprano Sylvia O'Brien, who deployed the stylistic and expressive flexibility of her voice to animate the music's affectionate nostalgia for the year 1947 and for the different incarnations as university exam hall and concert hall of the building on Earlsfort Terrace.

The third contemporary piece was the 1999 Fieberphantasie (Fever Fantasy)for string quartet, piano and clarinet by composer and clarinettist Jörg Widmann, a guest of the festival. The piece dips liberally into the bags of tricks for strings (scraping, col legno, snapping pizzicato, and so on) and for piano, notably the plucking on the strings from inside the instrument, but all in such a way as to produce something cohesive, measured and meaningful. The depth of its impact was evident in the enthusiastic audience response.

I had missed Widmann's earlier appearances in works by Reger and Zemlinsky, but heard his exceptionally translucent tone and beautifully instinctive phrasing in Schumann's Op 73 Fantasy Pieces (Fantasiestücke)for clarinet and piano. For his own piece, Widmann was here again joined by pianist Oliver Triendl, who unobtrusively went about his various partnerships but simply shone in the often tumultuous, concerto-like role for piano in the Schumann E flat Quintet, the festival's closing work (not including several encores).

This was a highlight, featuring the Voglers in high-spirited, emotionally wide-ranging music from the core Romantic repertoire. Perhaps there was an additional charge – to do with the closing of their vital chapter in the festival’s history – but it seemed there was something extra compared to their otherwise equally fine performances of Mendelssohn’s Op 18 String Quintet (with viola player Andra Darzins) and Brahms’s String Sextet No 1, also Op. 18 (again with Darzins and with cellist Ellen Margrete Flesjø). As the rich and readable printed programme notes argued, the joyous but far-reaching Mendelssohn defies the outdated suggestion that he was a lightweight, and the then innovative sextet line-up demonstrates a palpable unleashing of creativity from Brahms, so long artistically hog-tied by the quartet legacy of Beethoven.

Flesjø is cellist with Norway's Grieg Trio, the festival's guest ensemble, who joined the Voglers in explorations of the mainstream 19th-century music and in Irish folk-song arrangements by Beethoven (with Sylvia O'Brien). Playing works with obvious issues – formal novelty in the five slow-fast movements of Dvorák's DumkyTrio, layers of art, folk material, poetry and interpretation in the Beethoven songs, and the degree of incipient Frenchness in Fauré's C minor Piano Quartet – the Grieg Trio gave performances which left you satisfied with where they had taken you and not much bothered with issues. MICHAEL DUNGAN

DROGHEDA ARTS FESTIVAL:

The Music of Alexander Knaifel

St Peter’s Church

The casual listener might think that Alexander Knaifel has things in common with contemporaries such as John Tavener and Arvo Pärt. His music often has specific spiritual meaning, and much of it is slow, evidently economical and very quiet. But, as this portrait concert, organised by the Louth Contemporary Music Society, showed, the resemblances end there.

Knaifel (born 1943) is a historically aware composer, but his fleeting references are glimpsed ghosts. The earliest piece on the programme, Ostinatofor violin and cello (1964), starts almost like Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, but it is so attenuated that it seems to come from another world. A Mad Tea Party – Royal Version(2007), which was receiving its first performance, flits, makes stabs at quasi-Beethovenian gestures, and treats commonplace sonorities with such keen sensitivity to context that even a standard major chord is tense.

Violinist Elizabeth Cooney, violist Joachim Roewer and cellist Elizabeth Wilson played the new work commissioned for this concert, E.F. and Three Visiting Cards, an extraordinary, razor-sharp, subtly expressive piece that features Knaifel's distinctive technique of basing a work on a text that is not heard but is written on to the score as a guide to the performers.

Soprano Patricia Rozario, the Callino Quartet and pianist Oleg Malov gave a hauntingly beautiful performance of one of Knaifel's best-known pieces, O Heavenly King. But nobody in the concert could begrudge special praise for Malov's playing in the four works for piano solo.

Knaifel's is music in which nothing seems to happen. It is not easy listening, but its beautiful and deceptive simplicity is uplifting. Malov understands it profoundly. Every note (and often there's only one at a time) counted, thanks to his impeccable tone, timing and subtle physical language. Not just the sounds, but the silences too, were full of sustained expectation. MARTIN ADAMS

The Funeral Band

St Peter’s Church

Cosseting his pipes with the delicacy of a babe in arms, Liam Ó Floinn marshalled The Funeral Band for a memorable night of music at the Drogheda Arts Festival. Having first convened for Ó Floinn’s father’s funeral four months ago, this eye-watering conglomerate slowly revealed a bounty of treasures that reached effortlessly from vault to nave.

Dream teams don’t come much better than this. Seán Keane, the ever-effacing Chieftains fiddler, perched alongside Ó Floinn, and both were joined by a septet of sublime musicians. Composer Shaun Davey and singer Rita Connolly lured west Kerry box player, Seamus Begley, to the fray. Davey’s fellow Belfast composer, Neil Martin, brought his cello, Arty McGlynn his guitar and Rod McVey his keyboards. Percussionist Noel Eccles skirted around the back of the ensemble, bringing light and shade to arrangements that might have sat as comfortably in Edward Bunting’s Belfast of 1792 as they do in the 21st century.

Ó Floinn's choice of a pair of Galician tunes to open the performance spoke volumes for The Funeral Band's appetite for exploration. His razor-sharp whistle was joined initially by McVey's keyboards and McGlynn's intricate guitar, the trio amplifying the haughty melody lines with quiet insistence. Ó Floinn's pipes ultimately stewarded this canny choice of opener skywards, where they echoed imperceptibly while Seán Keane readied himself for a magnificent trio of reels. Keane's graceful execution of The Humours of Carrigaholtwas akin to an Olympic diver making a triple somersault look simple.

Another miracle lurked in the compatibility of Martin's beautifully spare second movement from his suite, No Tongue Can Tell, titled And They Loved, with Davey's contributions, including the glorious Carraig Aonair, which Rita Connolly sang with an understatement that straddled modesty and majesty with equal emphasis.

Seamus Begley's vocals were as sweet as they've ever been. If only he could bottle that cello-and-pipes accompaniment to his trademark Mo Giolla Meár.

A few rough-hewn hiccups along the way did little to detract from a night of music that was almost heartstoppingly beautiful. SIOBHÁN LONG

Dublin Gay Theatre Festival: Bash’d

New Theatre

At the beginning of any romantic relationship there comes a sensitive moment when it seems time to take things to the next level: you inflict your musical taste upon your partner. But as urbane Jack dispenses his CD collection to unworldly country boy Dillon, something more than preference is being revealed.

The names go by in a blur (Pet Shop Boys, Liberace, Depeche Mode, Madonna), interleaved with literary, cinematic and theatrical talismans (Oscar Wilde, Leonardos DiCaprio and da Vinci, John Cameron Mitchell, Tennessee Williams). It’s very nearly a complete gay education, but something is missing. There is not a single hip-hop record. That this “gay rap opera” from Canada’s Gay4Pay Co-op is performed entirely through rap makes the politics of Chris Craddock’s and Nathan Cuckow’s chosen form all the sharper.

Hip hop, to resort to cliche, is a genre founded on machismo, aggression and the expression of almost parodically heterosexual desires. At its best it is dizzyingly inventive, with rhymes and beats that stop you in your tracks. At its worst, it’s a dull recitation of misogynistic and homophobic shibboleths.

Over the course of a nimble, witty and engagingly provocative hour, Craddock and Cuckow deftly reclaim the music. Their brisk boy-meets-boy narrative, which makes flowing but revealing reference to gay rights, same-sex marriage, the antipathy of the Christian right, hate crimes and the toxic psychology of revenge, is – amazingly – only half the story.

Here, the medium is the message.

If NWA could use the word “nigger” as a badge of empowerment, so our rappers Feminem and T-Bag introduce themselves with the mantra: “All the real faggots throw their wrists in the air.” In the wrong wrists, this would fail utterly, but Craddock and Cuckow boast skills comparable to the better MCs, supported by a knowing, sample-happy score from Aaron Macri, who slips The Pet Shop Boys or Pachelbel neatly into the mix. The content may be queered, but the form is not. We get a fluid understanding of the propulsion, politics and aggression in the music – a real knowledge of the rules with no desire to bend them.

This is rewarding on a generic level, but in certain circumstances it feels like a missed opportunity. Conveying a narrative according to a strict beat is no easy feat, but a darkening story might benefit from gradually queasier beats, a flow that starts to stagger. Hip hop, however, has a persuasive flow; it’s easy to find your head nodding to Eminem or the Wu-Tang Clan, regardless of sentiment. Does this momentum explain how we reach a deflatingly ill-conceived twist, one that suggests what we have witnessed is a divine punishment? It seems unlikely.

In every other respect, this is an arch, respectful and intrinsically political performance: an invigorating blend of rhyme and reason. PETER CRAWLEY

Until May 9 as part of the Absolut Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, which runs until May 17