REVIEWS

Irish Timeswriters review recent performances

Opera Ireland

Gaiety, Dublin

Puccini - Madama Butterfly.

OPERA IRELAND'S artistic director Dieter Kaegi has departed from his company's routine for the new Madama Butterflywhich opened at the Gaiety Theatre on Saturday.

Under Kaegi, Opera Ireland has shown a penchant for taking unusual slants on the best-known works in the repertoire.

But this time around he has imported a production from the Teatro del Giglio in Lucca in which director Eike Gramss and designers Christoph Wagenknecht (sets) and Catherine Voeffray (costumes) give us a traditional Japanese house, the kind of dress that Puccini would have recognised in the opera, and a no-nonsense presentation that doesn't fiddle with the work itself.

The opening-night audience loved it, and many of those present rose to their feet in appreciation.

Puccini is a composer who knew how to tug the heartstrings, and this new Butterflydid nothing to impede him. It was an unusually even evening, not just in terms of casting, but also in the way the moments of what you might call big sing were integrated into the whole.

The fact that the standout arias did not stand out as they often do was by no means to the work's disadvantage.

Quite the contrary, in fact.

Korean soprano Yunah Lee's moments of girlish petulance as Cio-Cio San, and her extended inability to read the reality of her situation were all the more plausible for not being overshadowed.

The sharpness of Belgian baritone Marcel Vanaud had a businesslike efficiency, neither sympathetic nor insensitive, and US tenor Keith Olsen's Pinkerton was, well, as selfish as the role demands.

Chinese contralto Qiu Ling Zhang brought an unusual richness of timbre to the always compassionate presence of Butterfly's maid, Suzuki.

Italian conductor Bruno Dal Bon encouraged colour and passion in the playing of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, and at the same time secured mostly apt balances between stage and pit. In short, this is just the kind of production to win new friends for Opera Ireland. - MICHAEL DERVAN

• Runs until Sunday.

TV on the Radio

Tripod, Dublin

They may have chosen to take the "difficult second album" phenomenon literally with 2006's occasionally brilliant but largely frustrating Return to Cookie Mountain, but this year Brooklyn's blisteringly experimental outfit TV on the Radio finally delivered on their unbearable promise with Dear Science, the significantly less-difficult third album, which seduces as much as it challenges.

Headlining Heineken Green Synergy at a jam-packed Tripod, the art rockers have lost some of their thorns, but none of their edge.

A song is still as likely to borrow from jazz as punk, the beat equally prone to swing or stutter, while instrumentalist David Sitek will reliably attach wind chimes to his guitar or attack a wet snare drum with what appear to be over-sized cinnamon sticks. No matter how layered the music, there's always room for another idea. The difference now, though, is the mellow maturity that pulls off those combinations without agitation.

Tunde Adepimbe's lyrics retain a trace of the student radical, obliquely howling down capitalism and global warfare, but his voice has softened from shrieks and stabs into what you might call actual singing. Skittering across the stage as though moved by the vibrations alone, he bats the air during the elegant chaos of Young Liars, part preacher, part demonic possession.

A judicious set even finds older songs subtly transformed. The Wrong Way, once a menacing concoction of jazz squawks and industrial throbs, is here accessible and declamatory, like a deconsecrated gospel hymn.

Of the new material, Golden Agearrives with the unabashed urgency of disco, Shout Me Outstruts with soulful purpose and Dancing Choosesimply lets loose. It's an ebullient display, but mercifully they can still be a little gauche. Banter is minimal, the surging Wolf Like Meis thrown out way too early, and in between the ferocious growl of DLZ, or sweet reverb of Love Dog, they somehow neglect to play Halfway Home- easily one of the best tunes of 2008. That's TV on the Radio all over though; they are no longer a hard band to love, but they won't make it too easy. - Peter Crawley

Ó Lionáird, Crash Ensemble

Imma, Dublin

Gavin Bryars — Anáil Dé.

Sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird was the supporting act at the first appearance of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble in Ireland in 2004. That encounter sowed the seeds of Bryars's new Anáil Dé (The Breath of God),settings of Irish spiritual texts for voice and an ensemble made up of two violas, cello, electric guitar and double bass. The new work was premiered at Imma on Friday by Ó Lionáird with members of the Crash Ensemble and the composer himself on double bass.

And it was presented in a sequence which mixed in some purely instrumental items from Bryars's series of Laude (works which he has been writing to medieval texts for the last five or six years) and traditional arrangements. Strangely, the concert's promoters, Note Productions, provided neither programme notes nor translations for the sung texts, and not a word of introduction to the work was provided from the stage.

Bryars has described the new piece as "a journey - a kind of space that you wander through". On Friday that space was one where energy and activity were severely constrained and the atmosphere was consistently on the downbeat side of plaintive.

The writing was like a kind of slow-motion stirring in which almost everything was somewhat distended.

The effect was strangely desultory, even dreary, as if Bryars were hovering around the edges of some darkside New Age discovery.

Ó Lionáird's husky vocals did not always sound entirely comfortable, and those numbers where he sang with greatest confidence - the arrangements of Cogar na nAingeal and Go mBeannaitear Duit a Mhuire - stood out for the ease and firmness of their delivery.

The high points came in some of the lonely guitar solos. They created pools of desolation of the kind that are frequently heard accompanying movie images depicting forsaken landscapes and urban dereliction.

The moments of harmonic focus that play such an important role in animating Byrars's best work were, sadly, conspicuous by their absence. - Michael Dervan