Reviews

Irish Times critics review the Guinness Choir and Orchestraat the NCH, Fernando García Torres in the John Field Room and the Brad Shepik Trio at Crawdaddy

Guinness Choir and Orchestra/Milne
NCH, Dublin

There was a double dose of impressive artistic courage in the Guinness Choir's choice of programme for its spring concert. First, the choir confronted the Irish collective blind spot for English composers. Big names such as Britten and Elgar are rarely programmed here, with composers from the next tier down - such as Gerald Finzi - rarer still. A choir would be reckoned brave for devoting half a programme to one of these and the other half to a sure thing. The Guinness Choir, risking box-office woes, went English all the way.

Second, the two pieces - Finzi's Wordsworth setting, Intimations of Immortality and Britten's celebration of the end of winter, the Spring Symphony - present considerable challenges to the choir, being unfamiliar and hard to learn.

Artistic courage was certainly vindicated on the first count, with the English programme drawing close to a full house. The outcome on the second count was more mixed. There is a huge amount of singing in both works, and the choir's valiant focus on getting all notes and entries right took a heavy toll on basics such as vowel sounds, which lost their quality, and enunciation of consonants, which was mostly weak, obscuring the text and undermining rhythmic vitality. These were not issues for the young choristers of the Palestrina Choir, whose singing was technically disciplined as well as pure and spirited.

The choir was at its best in big homophonic passages such as the tenth section of the Finzi, when it brought a real spirit of celebration to Wordsworth's delight in nature, and in Milton's "The Morning Star" in the Britten.

Soprano Charlotte Ellett - standing in for the indisposed Julie Moffat - and mezzo Emma Selway were insightful in Britten's sampling of five centuries of English poets from Robert Herrick to WH Auden. In contrast, tenor Martyn Hill, who sang in both works, was remote and disengaged, almost void of any communicative value.

Conductor David Milne drew much fine playing from the orchestra, establishing a brooding, deeper-than-nostalgic wistfulness from the Finzi. Showcased instruments, such as the horn in the Finzi and the harps and trumpets in the Britten, were all very strong.

This was probably the Britten symphony's first Irish performance, almost 60 years on, for which the choir received financial support from the Britten-Pears Foundation.

MICHAEL DUNGAN

Fernando García Torres
John Field Room, Dublin

For his Irish debut, Mexican pianist Fernando García Torres slipped in some rarely heard Mexican pieces along with familiar works by Beethoven, Chopin and Berg.

He focused on just one Mexican composer, Manuel M Ponce (1882-1948), a man known outside his native country mostly for his guitar music and through arrangements of his song Estrellita. The great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, played a large part in popularising the song, for which, because of a negligent publisher, Ponce never actually received any royalties.

Torres offered two mazurkas by Ponce and a Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Handel. The mazurkas were characterfully un-European in musical manner, the Prelude and Fugue altogether more anodyne.

Sadly, it has to be said, none of the standard repertoire came across with real conviction. Torres's approach to Beethoven's Sonata in A flat, Op 110, was prosaic, the great fugue made to sound more chordal than contrapuntal. Berg's early Sonata, Op 1, seemed effortful, and the sense of struggle became greater in Chopin's Sonata in B minor, at times to the point where listening through the gaps in continuity became a struggle in itself.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Brad Shepik Trio
Crawdaddy, Dublin

It's been a while since guitarist Brad Shepik was last here, but the wait has been worth it. Presented by the Improvised Music Company, the trio, completed by Hammond organist Gary Versace and drummer Tom Rainey, made it clear from the start that this was going to be a typically intense outing. The bar was immediately raised to a high level.

Both the opening pieces, Témoin and Air, from their latest album, were launched at an uncompromisingly uptempo rate, despite which Shepik's clarity of thought and Rainey's inventive support and interaction were brilliantly articulated. Whatever the reason, Versace seemed somewhat the junior partner in these exchanges; he seemed to operate as a colourist in the ensemble, a factor that also informed his solos, and left the real meat to the dialogue between the other two.

It was enough. Shepik is a virtuoso and a remarkably logical soloist, whose sense of form was evident even in the long, unaccompanied rubato introduction to Two Door, a piece with a Balkan feel, on which the trio produced its most unfettered blowing. As a soloist, his structured response to the angularities of The Crossing, and his lyricism on the slow The Dove, emphasised his range.

As for Rainey, he is extraordinary. Unceasingly inventive without being showy, he dotted every musical and dramatic "i" and crossed every "t" in the trio's discourse, seemingly incapable of coming up with an idea that was inappropriate or unmusical. Both a great timekeeper and a remarkable colourist, he may well be the finest living jazz drummer. It is virtually impossible to conceive the rhythmic flexibility of this trio, and the sheer sense of drama it conveys, without him.

They didn't sustain this level in the second set. Perhaps it was jet-lag, but the energy wasn't there. It had a positive side. The second set offered more light and shade than the intense focus on uptempo work, customary with New York groups, does. It yielded a calypso-like Sunrise, on which both Shepik and Versace produced delightful solos.

RAY COMISKEY