REVIEWS

A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics

Galway Early Music Festival

St Nicholas Collegiate Church, Galway, Kilcummin Parish Church, Oughterard

Ensemble Unicorn's concert at the Galway Early Music Festival on Saturday raised an interesting question. Was this Ireland's first ever concert devoted entirely to music from Cyprus? And, you might well ask, what does Cyprus actually have to offer in terms of early music? Well, as the New Grove Dictionaryputs it, "Cyprus became an outpost of French culture in the later Middle Ages". Richard the Lionheart took over the island during the third crusade, sold it to the Knights Templar, who chose to place it in French control. It was during the reign of King Janus (1398-1432) that music came to flourish, particularly after his marriage to Charlotte de Bourbon in 1411. The survival of a manuscript, now held in Turin, documents the music that was being written – polyphonic mass movements, motets in Latin and French, ballades, rondeaux and virelais – all copied out without any attribution.

The six members of Ensemble Unicorn – Markus Forster, counter tenor, Jane Achtman, fiddle, Thomas Wimmer, fiddle and lute, Guillermo Perez, portative organ, Wolfgang Reithofer, percussion, and Michael Posch, recorder – presented a 70-minute concert of 15 pieces.

The music in this fascinating evening at St Nicholas Collegiate Church was of a severe beauty, the part-writing of the anonymous composers showing an independence that at times struck the ear as uncannily modern. Markus Foster’s singing had an affecting directness, and an almost instrumental ease of movement. But, sadly, the event was let down by the failure to provide any translations for the French texts which were printed in the programme.

The repertoire of the final concert, given by harpist Andrew Lawrence-King in the intimate surroundings of Kilcummin Parish Church in Oughterard on Sunday afternoon, felt a lot closer to our own time, though in fact it was a lot nearer to the anonymous composers of 15th century Cyprus.

This was in part due to Lawrence-King’s skills as a natural communicator – he’s one of those rare performers who marries high musicianship with effortless, unobtrusive showmanship.

His recital, titled “Tristan’s Lament – Romances, Dance Music and Laments”, ranged over three instruments, psaltery (he began with a narration to the background of a piece improvised out of the process of tuning the instrument, continuing what he called “the medieval tradition of artistic tuning”), medieval harp (on which he offered just a handful of pieces), and baroque triple harp (which he plays with a keyboard-like freedom rather than the more limited style that’s associated with the modern concert harp).

The major composers to be represented were Dowland and Purcell, and in his transcriptions Lawrence-King showed a sharpness of dynamic shading and moments of piercing expressiveness that neither the lute nor the harpsichord can quite match.

His showmanship came to the fore in his choice of encore, an arrangement on triple harp of Handel's HallelujahChorus, delivered with all the bells and whistles, and legerdemain that helped Vladimir

Horowitz bring the house down with his piano transcriptions. Not quite what you expect at an early music concert, but a real treat. MICHAEL DERVAN

The Last Mile

The Factory Space, Sligo

The opening moments of Malcolm Hamilton's new play The Last Mileare played out with deliberate slowness, as the protagonist and narrator of this one-man show makes the long journey around the perimeter of the theatre space to the stage. This painstaking beginning sets the somber pace of Tom Creed's production for Blue Raincoat Theatre Company. The play is about grief and memory – a man has lost his wife, Eenie, to cancer – but it is also about dying; his loss has brought him ever closer to the realisation of his own mortality. Without Eenie this is indeed the last mile of his own life's journey.

Jamie Vartan’s set strips any sense of domesticity from the world that Hamilton’s play evokes. A raised black rectangular platform becomes an oil-sodden beach, the domestic detritus scattered along its shoreline the charred remnants of a marriage, a life, now burnt out. The dismembered mannequin evokes the disembodiement of death; the ascent of Eenie’s soul to a higher place when her body fails her.

Hamilton’s short play is in fact best when it remains allusive like Creed’s production, such as in those opening moments where we are not quite sure of the events that have brought him to this place. As Vartan’s metaphorical setting, Joe Hunt’s ambient sound design and Michael Cummins’ lighting conspire, we wonder is this not some post-apocalyptic wasteland. In fact, as The Man literally pieces the past together – reconstructing the mannequin that has come to stand in for his wife – the play becomes less interesting, descending into sentimentalism and, often, cliché.

Hamilton finds an able narrator in Brendan Ellis, who carries grief onto the stage with him like a sack, spilling memories upon the sand where he and Eenie first met. While his rich voice is cracked with guilt and regret, while his own body breaks down under the weight of his new loneliness, it seems a strange and easy resolution that he should find himself healed by a sweet cup of tea with a neighbour. The Last Mile, then, somehow becomes the first mile, forcing the play to end on a note of optimism that is not quite fully earned. SARA KEATING

Eblana Trio

City Hall, Dublin

Mendelssohn– Trio No 1 in D minor. Shostakovich– Trio No 2 in E minor.

The Eblana Trio – violinist Aisling O’Dea, cellist Alexandra Mackenzie and pianist Veronica McSwiney – were the last ensemble but one (Bulgaria’s Eolina Quartet on May 24th next) to grapple with the challenging reverb in City Hall, temporary home to the Sundays at Noon concert series.

With the exception of the Mendelssohn trio’s opening movement, in which layers of sound piled up and left the various lines and harmonies less than fully intelligible, they coped very well. For the rest of the concert such problems were far less noticeable.

There was, however, a trade-off in that the Eblana’s acoustic caution required some artistic containment, so that the emotional strength of this prime, Romantic-era music was subdued. Unless that’s just how they read the piece. But it was tame. That said, there was much fine playing, notably from McSwiney in what is a hectic and virtuosic piano part.

Tamer again was Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 from 1944, notably in the violin part where O’Dea appeared to restrict herself to delivering rather than inhabiting her line. Both quick movements – the second movement Scherzo and the Finale – were missing something of the character that was anticipated in McSwiney’s spoken introduction when she described the composer’s response to the war in general and to the plight of the Jews in particular.

In relation to this background, the slow movements were more effective. The eerie, high-pitched harmonics on cello and then violin established a dark, meditative atmosphere which was continued in the gentle interplay between the string instruments in the central Largo, and then brought full circle in the nicely-graded descent to silence at the very end.

The Sundays at Noon concert series returns to its home, the Hugh Lane Gallery (but to the Sean Scully Room) from June 7th when Ioana Petcu plays music for solo violin by Bach and Telemann. MICHAEL DUNGAN