Reviews

Critics from The Irish Times review Cascioli, RTÉ NSO/Andrettaat the NCH, Alabama 3and The Jimmy Cakeat The Button Factory, Ear, Knife, Throatat the Tivoli Theatre and O'Brien, Bodleyat the Hugh Lane Gallery all in Dublin

Cascioli, RTÉ NSO/Andretta
NCH, Dublin

Berlioz Carnaval Romain Overture; Mozart Piano Concerto in C K467; Puccini Capriccio sinfonico; Respighi Pines of Rome
The Italian pianist Gianluca Cascioli was just 14 when he won the 1994 Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition. What made the competition stand out in advance was the composition of the jury, which included composers Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter and George Benjamin, pianists Maurizio Pollini, Charles Rosen, Bruno Canino, Andrea Lucchesini, Louis Lortie and Alfons Kontarsky. And Cascioli, who recorded three CDs for Deutsche Grammophon following his win, turned out to be every bit as unusual as the jury that gave him the prize.

His approach to Mozart in his début with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra on Friday, was to make what sounded like a myriad of tiny adjustments to the expected shape of the Concerto in C, K467, the work now tagged with its association with the film, Elvira Madigan.

Cascioli worked rather like a designer changing the decoration of a room through minuscule movements of the furniture and subtle modifications of colour and lighting, so that everything could seem just like it was and yet the effect be completely different. His control of tone and texture was simply astonishing, and his fingerwork often light as a feather. With cadenzas and decorated fermatas that took the music-making well away from the norms of Mozartian style, this was a performance that was both far-fetched and utterly convincing, Mozart re-thought from a thoroughly modern perspective.

The conductor, Giancarlo Andretta, offered orchestral support that was sharp in outline and much lighter in weight than one normally hears from the orchestra. He was, however, less subtle in Berlioz's Roman CarnivalOverture, and in the extravagant pictorialism of Respighi's Pines of Rome.

His greatest success was in Puccini's Capriccio sinfonico, the last work he wrote as a student at the Milan Conservatory, and a seriously accomplished piece of work for an 18-year-old. Like any sensible workman, Puccini later plundered it for its best bits, and, since its first publication, as recently as 1978, modern listeners have had the fascination of hearing the first incarnation of the music that now opens the opera, La Bohème. Andretta handled this fascinating piece with persuasive thrust.
MICHAEL DERVAN

Alabama 3
The Button Factory

Who said drugs, guns and the bible didn't make good travelling companions? Hell, they're better fodder for hunkered down, acid-dropping techno country music than any pastoral plain ever was.

According to Alabama 3's Larry Love, Dublin's never had any trouble getting to the crux of what his band are all about: it's jugular-bursting, teeth-grinding, get your bootie on down kind of music - and did we mention attitude? They've got that by the barrelful too.

From the opening bars of Mao Tse Tung Said(when most every sardine-packed punter raised their fists in unison, a scarifying testament of their loyalty to this pack of nine loose cannons who call themselves the Alabama 3), Reverend D Wayne Love and Larry Love revelled in a set list that sanctified every illegal activity known (as well as those still yet unknown) to mankind.

Truth is that the good Reverend is showing terminal signs of wear: gone is his pistol-whipping rap and in its place, a shadowy, weak-kneed replacement. The cut of his jib these days is far closer to that of Spinal Tap than it is to his beloved First Presbyterian Church Of Elvis The Divine.

The discovery of the evening was unquestionably their latest femme fatale, Devlin Love. A powerhouse amalgam of Amy Winehouse and Tina Turner, she brings a magnificent gospel and blues sensibility to the floor, inhabiting everything from Holy Bloodto Woke Up This Morningas if her next breath depended on it. An incendiary performance to be relished and relived again and again.
SIOBHÁN LONG

Ear, Knife, Throat
Tivoli Theatre, Dublin

"Who wants to listen to a 50-something-year-old woman with issues?" asks Tonka Babiae, the sole character of Ear, Knife, Throat, by way of an introduction. "Who wants to watch a 50-something-year-old actress?" she continues with typically acerbic humour as the barrier between audience and performer is breezily dismantled. The huge attendance for this performance by the venerable Polish actress Krystyna Janda may serve as a clear answer.

In Poland, Janda is the star of several films and countless plays, she is also the author of a number of books and a handful of records. Serving as the play's performer, director and adapter - from the novel by Croatian writer Vedrana Rudan - Janda takes full possession of the show, while somehow dispelling any whiff of a vanity project. Her two-hour monologue negotiates a minefield of tumultuous thoughts as Tonka spends one sleepless night in front of the television, pacing her living room or slumping into a sofa, while an addled mind flits between her life story, her love life, casual observations on ephemera, regular profanities and the still seeping horrors of the civil war in the Balkans.

A compulsively involving but deeply unreliable narrator, Tonka's stream of consciousness has the disjointed logic of a channel-hopping television. Here, memories of the war are ever-present but always in the background, flickering on a TV screen that is deliberately muted.

Janda expertly delivers this disorientating blend of uneasy comedy and stark atrocity, manoeuvring between the two with complex, slalom-pole shifts. For the few spectators reliant on English surtitles - sadly delivered in stodgy paragraphs, and often wildly out of sync with Janda's performance - the experience could be less deliberately bewildering. But few could fail to recognise a magnetic performance or emerge unaffected by such powerful, troubling material.
PETER CRAWLEY

The Jimmy Cake
The Button Factory

When the nine members of Dublin's The Jimmy Cake took the stage at The Button Factory on Friday night, they did so beneath the benign gaze of the button-eyed, skull-clutching bunny who graces the cover of their new and long-awaited album, Spectre & Crown, and with six guest musicians - a string quartet and two extra brass players.

The music was all about patience. Like the best electronic musicians, The Jimmy Cake layers sound until they've accreted a rich blanketing of audio. But this is no laptop-based etheria. These were skilled musicians gigging hard and live - an insurgent orchestra - and they know when complex discord needs to make the turn into symphonic synergy. That required keen timing, which the band displayed in spades, as when, in Hugs For Buddy, the fierce thrum churned by bassist Dip and powered by a tightly-coiled John Dermody on drums fell away cleanly to leave the high, gorgeous plaint of Lisa Carey's clarinet. They missed this mark only once, in Deathfall Priest, which tipped into the cacophonous, though even there the music stayed tight, and it turned out to be a brief number, the exception for a band that can produce solid songs eight, 10 and (in the case of Hungry Ghosts) 15 minutes long.

The crowd was subdued but responsive, shushing itself like a classroom awaiting storytime when the band went into Red Tony, a number which opened quietly, with keyboardist Paul Smith alone kneading the simple riff that would run behind the song, and then get taken up and made rich by the strings, mournful by the banjo, and heartbreaking by the woodwinds. Perhaps to counter the sublimity of Red Tony(and for what guitarist Vincent Dermody charmingly called "our pretend last song"), the band went into the rollicking Jetta's Palace, which got the room into something of a frenzy.
DAVID SHAFER

O'Brien, Bodley
Hugh Lane Gallery

Seóirse Bodley Song Cycles on the Poems of Michael O'Siadhail
How fraught is the setting of poetry to music? What a minefield for composers to cross when they choose a poem - already as complete and self-contained as its author can make it - and then try to add something to it.

Once written, of course, every text has an autonomy of its own. This is how texts from St John's Gospel to Shakespeare to TS Eliot can end up transformed, for example, into Broadway musicals. But it's an autonomy that is generally much easier for the public to appreciate than for the author.

The poet Michael O'Siadhail, in attendance at Sunday's recital in the Hugh Lane Gallery, seemed to welcome with enthusiasm the addition to his verses of a new aesthetic layer. This is not surprising given the respectful, insightful and unerringly apposite settings composed for them by Seóirse Bodley, who was on hand to play the piano part.

Soprano Sylvia O'Brien was at ease with difficult vocal lines and deployed a wide dynamic and expressive range to match the big spectrum of declamation called for in the poems.

Bodley's idiom is a very contemporary one: lyrical but not really melodic, not strophic, spontaneously responsive to an individual line or word, in the manner of much contemporary opera, by which I don't mean random since there is always an underlying sense of structure and unity. Hints of other composers include Schoenberg (for example in Squall, portraying the ferocity and uneasy aftermath of a row between loved ones), and Barber, in Delivery, first poem in the Earlsfort Suite. Bodley incorporates a discreet, un-sugary hint of nostalgia as O'Siadhail considers the year 1947, delightfully rhyming "Dead Sea Scrolls" with "platform soles".

O'Siadhail can present something simple like a portrait - the girl walking home from her debs in the early morning "against a yawning tide of suburbanites" in Debonair, the fifth poem of The Naked Flame. Or, as in the final poem, Rhapsody, he can be indirect or even elusive, juxtaposing landscape and musical metaphors to explore how the naked flame can both fill us with passion but also sometimes burn us.

Bodley matches every image, bringing the débutante to joyous life with a busy, carefree piano part, or exploding from the gentle dream-world of a pastoral metaphor into O'Siadhail's final outburst.

Other arbiters, not excluding such music's relatively narrow public, will decide where exactly Bodley's settings ultimately rest in posterity. But it can be recorded here that this recital - for which rapture would not be too strong a word to associate with the way the audience reacted - was a near-perfect confluence of beautiful, moving poetry, the response to it by a composer, and the conduit of fine performance.
MICHAEL DUNGAN