Reviewed today are Kanye West at the RDS Simmonscourt , Scharoun Ensembleat Imma and Kitt, Medjimorecat the Hugh Lane Gallery
Kanye West
RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin
Are hip-hop celebrities at elevated risk of clinical megalomania and delusions of grandeur? Is that cause or correlation? Rap music was born of quickness and rhyme, and its early practitioners competed fiercely with each other to stay at the cutting edge. You had to be able to say you were the best, so mainly you rapped about how it was so patently clear that you were the best. That overt megalomania still spills out of all the top acts, but the trick has become to sharpen the point: what will be nature of the claim - bombastic, sarcastic, threatening, wry?
Kanye West has chosen a straight-up form of pure vanity, a sterling self-regard, and he has grown too powerful to be in the avant-garde of the music. But as he showed at the RDS, he has not become a static dispenser of his own celebrity. Rather, he is still working it, sweating hard, digging deep and sincerely into a song when the rhymes need force behind them, while at other times just loping or lolling, chin thrust, through a riveting spectacle, letting the highly produced music share the stage with his highly produced persona.
The stage: 'twas a thing of beauty, by turns giant laptop, spaceship dashboard and alien terrain. It also jetted various colours of flame, swivelled, and appeared to run with water and whip with blown sand. Two huge screens flanked it, with video constantly close-up on West to allow the audience to track the psychic drama playing on his face (introspection clear by firm set of jaw).
West trod this fantastic contraption in a sort of Buck Rogers deerskin. The show was part hokey drama about a crashed spaceship with a satnav named Jane. West, stranded and alone, rapped and sang about the various travails of superstardom and the general loneliness of being brilliant. Then, after a bit of lewd dialogue, Jane transformed into the eponym of West's greatest hit, Gold Digger, the shooting stars themselves proclaimed him the biggest star in the universe, West saved himself, blasted off, and was raptured back for two encores. DAVID SHAFER
Scharoun Ensemble
Imma, Dublin
Mozart - Horn Quintet K417.
Weber - Clarinet Quintet.
Schubert - Octet.
The Association of Music Lovers (AML), which began life 41 years ago as the Limerick Music Association (LMA), is behind many of the finest chamber music concerts in Dublin. This one was no exception from the usual high quality. The performers were eight members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra whose collective title, the Scharoun Ensemble, honours Hans Scharoun, the architect of the orchestra's celebrated Berlin concert hall.
The ensemble has long-standing connections with the LMA/AML. Its precursor, the Berlin Philharmonic Octet, gave the LMA's first concert in 1967, and several return visits have included the association's memorable 40th anniversary concert in April last year.
This performance in the Great Hall of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham included two works from the 1967 inaugural programme, Mozart's Horn Quintet and Schubert's Octet. The addition of Weber's Clarinet Quintet made for an uncommonly satisfying afternoon's listening.
Coordination was, when necessary, managed through the delicate signalling of first violinist Wolfram Brandl. For the most part, however, the playing was as if guided by democratic instincts, each player taking his turn as primus inter paresas required.
Thus neither the horn player, Stefan de Leval Jezierski, nor the clarinettist, Alexander Bader, availed of the extra bow merited by their superb soloistic contributions to the two quintets.
A more fulfilling live performance of either piece would be hard to imagine, except perhaps that Jezierski's infallible and characterful tones might have been directed a little more towards the audience.
The keystone of the Scharoun Ensemble's repertoire remains the Octet by Schubert, which they finally released on disc three years ago. Every moment offered something to savour, be it flexible and subtly foregrounded melody, uncommonly well-focused harmony or pristine tonal matching. And with most of the repeat marks observed, the six extensive movements ran to just over an hour of absolute pleasure. ANDREW JOHNSTONE
Kitt, Medjimorec
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Schumann - Märchenbilder. Anthony Payne - Out of the
Depths Comes Song. Prokofiev - Sonata Op 119.
English composer Anthony Payne (born 1936) enjoys the mixed blessing of attaining his greatest public attention through someone else's music. In 1998 his elaboration on Elgar's deathbed sketches for a third symphony was a major popular success, with Payne earning a degree of exposure that would have been hard to predict on the basis of his previous work.
Foremost among the impressive features of his Elgar completion were his mastery of large orchestral forces and his ability to sustain the continuous presence of Elgar's voice. So it was interesting to hear Out of the Depths Comes Song, a 10-minute piece for cello and piano which is Payne writing in his ownvoice. It was the world premiere.
The dedicatee - Austrian cellist Florian Kitt - explained in a brief introduction that the piece has a rather romantic, impressionist surface which belies the complex string textures the cellist must work through. The structure is in mirror form, possibly involving retrograde lines (if I understood correctly) and certainly seeing the "song", having risen from "out of the depths", going back to them at the end.
Kitt, who has a special interest in contemporary music, brought to the Payne piece an element of animation and intensity that had been missing in his earlier quite bland account of Schumann's child-inspired Märchenbilder. Also contributing to a shortage of expressivity in the Schumann was pianist Rita Medjimorec whose velvet touch was simply too universally applied.
Velvet was perhaps also the wrong approach for the Prokofiev Sonata, which seemed to me to be missing the bite that is part of its make-up. And although the duo's best moments were in this piece - including some nice lyrical touches - it mostly felt as though there was a much better piece trapped inside, raring to get out. MICHAEL DUNGAN
