REVIEWS

The Irish Times reviews the arts

Axa Dublin International Piano Competition, Round 2

RDS, Dublin

NO ONE I spoke to at the second round of the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition was yet calling the winner. This was quite a contrast to the situation back in 2003, when Antti Siirala took the top prize, and his name was being bandied about as early as the first round. This year, however, not many people were even volunteering the names they expected to see in the finals.

Competitions, of course, vary from year to year, and long-time observers in Dublin and elsewhere have come to terms with the fact that juries’ collective decisions can be not just unpredictable but also impenetrable, even to individual members of the juries that make them.

Other obligations kept me away from all of the first round of the competition, so I was hearing 19 of the 20 players of the second round for the first time, the exception being the sole Irish survivor, Fiachra Garvey.

The first player to make me sit up was the 22-year-old Russian, Olga Kozlova, who managed to make music in parts of Liszt's Dante Sonata, where a lot of young pianists just make noise.

Her powerful rhetoric was less successful in Ginastera’s First Sonata, where the punchy passages (and there are lots) seemed to be delivered for their rhythmic juggernaut value alone.

Yoon Soo Rhee (27) from Korea showed lots of delicacy and atmosphere in Ravel's Miroirs, and a good ability at controlling the music in independent layers.

She engaged in the note-chasing games of the second book of Brahms's PaganiniVariations with palpable glee and at the same time she transcended the étude-like display with real music-making.

Mu Ye Wu (23) and from China, seemed to be skimming the surface in Chopin's Sonata in B minor, with moments of precipitousness in his rubato which regularly interfered with any natural sense of flow. But his handling of Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushkahad a gobsmacking mechanical brilliance.

Eric Zuber (23) from the US was suave and controlled in Schubert's Impromptuin G flat, and then offered a complete change of mood, presenting Liszt's Sonata in B minor with boyish enthusiasm, plenty of thunder, a real delight in rapid octave work, and a sense of discipline that's rare in boyish accounts of this particular piece.

Bulgarian Evgeni Bozhanov (25) looks like the joker in this year’s pack. He sits on a remarkably low stool, so that he stands out visually to the listener every bit as much has he does musically.

He has an incredibly highly developed sense of the fantastical, which he showed to great effect in a selection from Shostakovich's set of Preludes, Op 34. His Beethoven (the Sonata in E flat, Op 31 No 3) ranged from the sober to the almost eccentric, but in a way that always intrigued, and his treatment of two Chopin mazurkas was again odd and oddly engaging. His closing piece, the Finale from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beautyin the transcription by Mikhail Pletnev, brought cheers of approval from the audience.

The two days of the second round brought quite an amount of dutiful, professionally prepared playing, the sort of playing that engenders respect rather than enthusiasm.

Tanya Gabrielian (25) from the US might have fallen into that category in her playing of Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, D845.

But the straightforwardness of her approach seemed to come from a sense of trust in and identity with the music. There was a raptness in her performance which made it stand out from everything else – heavy music that had been fully absorbed and which she recreated with plainness and subtlety.

Her Debussy L'Isle Joyeuse,which she didn't get to finish because time ran out seemed all too literal by comparison.

Alexej Gorlatch (20) from Ukraine figured in conversation rather more than most of the competitors. His controlled approach to the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata in A, Op 101, showed clearly why.

But his excitability rather got the better of him later on, and he attacked Bartók's Out of DoorsSuite with a vehemence that suggested a bluriness of vision which turned every "f" marking into "fff", escalating requests for loud playing into as loud as possible.

But he easily delivered the knock-out performance he seemed to have set his heart on.

The jury’s choice of 12 included Gorlatch, Bozhanov, Zuber, and Rhee, along with Sasha Grynyuk, Soo-Yoon Ham, Naomi Kudo, Steven Lin, Jong- Hai Park, Slawomir Wilk, Soo Jung Ann, and Emmanuel Christien.

Ireland’s last hope, Fiachra Garvey (21) had a cheering fan club which, sadly, didn’t manage to propel him to success.

He made some risky tempo decisions in Shostakovich and Liszt, showing real gumption but also stretching him a little too far. He was at his best in a selection of Debussy preludes, with his finest playing reserved for the lazy haze of La Terrasse des Audiences du clair de Lune.

The Axa Dublin International Piano Competition continues at the National Concert Hall on Thursday and Friday.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Apocrifu, Dublin Dance Festival

Abbey Theatre

FLEMISH-MOROCCAN choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has always been attracted to drawing. For him, dance is a temporary drawing that disappears once the movement stops, and more importantly, is re-written once the movement starts again.

In Apocrifu, which opened this year's Dublin Dance Festival, that ephemerality is pitted against the permanency of the written word.

Another constant theme for Cherkaoui is the equality of religions, cultures and individuals, and here he presents his case using his most canonical evidence to date: sacred texts.

In one light-hearted moment, the choreographer compares different versions of the story of Cain and Abel within the Talmud, Koran and Bible.

Highlighting their underlying subjectivity, he reinforces their interchangeability with a physical set-piece: the three dancers – Cherkaoui, Dimitri Jourde and Yasuyuki Shuto — line up behind one another and move the three sacred texts around like a six-armed shiva.

But for the most part the tone is darker. The Corsican acapella group A Filetta are a constant presence, moving silently around stage and ignored by the performers like unseen angels.

Their renditions of liturgical and secular texts switch between uplifting and leavening, and so it is left to the piles of books around the stage to provide the most malevolent influence.

Initially used as stepping stones to bring the three characters together, they soon become missiles, flung at the first sign of difference.

In contrast, diverse forms of expression are presented equally to coalesce into a universal statement, including a Japanese Bunraku puppet, legs bells (like those found in Kathak dance) and a movement vocabulary that includes classical ballet and circus skills.

Cherkaoui might question the rigidity of the written word, and particularly sacrosanctity, but ultimately the difference is in individual interpretation rather than content. In offering dance as a temporary drawing, he champions freedom of interpretation over blind obedience to text.

But, while Apocrifuis an impressive choreographic achievement, it rests somewhat uneasily between the metaphoric and the literal, and misses its potential to be truly mythical.

MICHAEL SEAVER