REVIEWS

Ballet, opera and rock feature in today's reviews.

Wilde Extravaganza

Cork Opera House

The dancers presented in the Wilde Extravaganza programme now on tour with Ballet Ireland display a finesse which suggests their abilities might have been a little further stretched than in this selection. Opening with Sing Sing Sing as a kind of tasting dish unrelated to Oscar Wilde, the choreography by Rain Francis to the music of Louis Prima and Benny Goodman allows both style and wit to polish a display of technical assurance.

As a tribute to Wilde's own assertions about art, Gunther Falusy succeeds in Art is Uselessin creating, with Saint-Saens, a mood which traps the dancers in an adagio-like stateliness, while also managing to contradict the playwright's opinion. Only in Falusy's version of The Birthday of the Infantais there a suggestion of freedom of range, with Ryoko Yagyu as the Infanta and Kumiko Nakamura as the dwarf, bringing character as well as skill to their performance in a piece considerably assisted by Werner Dittrich's costumes.

Amy Drew, as Sybil Vane in Dorian Greyprovides a vital dramatic impetus to Morgann Runacre-Temple's work, devised to a music collage incorporating Mozart, Janacek, Bartok, Shostakovich and Sjogren and featuring Lorcan O'Neill and Thomas Thorne as the portrait and its subject. A lapse in attention to detail means that such essential props as the mirror and the knife are so small as to be insignificant, but considerably more damaging is the operation of whatever lighting plot there is, as several visually and structurally important moments are summarily extinguished.

Second-hand opinions may have no place in a review, but it has to be said that when a programme-less companion was asked when she had realised that what we had just witnessed was Salome, she answered: "When they brought in the severed head". That's the truth of it, really; Morgann Runacre-Temple gives her dancers a lot of reeling and writhing to suggest lust and incest in a scenario which seems to combine Grimm's Fairy Taleswith the New Testament, and while Amy Drew's Salome and Simon Lindsay's Jokanaan are adept at orgasmic contortions, this is not enough to convey either the narrative or the creative intensity of Wilde's play.

MARY LELAND

Madama Butterfly

National Concert Hall

Madama Butterflyis one of those operas that places a huge responsibility on the artist singing the title role. In Ellen Kent's production at the NCH, Puccini's geisha was performed by Elena Dee, a young Korean soprano who has taken on this demanding role far too early in her career. She has good stage presence, looks credibly young and acts convincingly. She elicited considerable pathos from scenes like the letter reading episode and the final acceptance of the heroine's desertion. But elsewhere, she displayed vocal shortcomings. Under pressure, the voice took on a disturbing tremulous quality, and she scooped too much for this listener's comfort. Worst of all, her climactic high notes were considerably short of true intonation.

Ukranian-born Andriy Perfilov's youthful good looks and amiable demeanour rather undermined the hate factor that B F Pinkerton ought to evoke. His Italian vowels were somewhat odd, but his fluent lyric tenor gave much pleasure and he produced the necessary vocal clout when required. Mezzo Zarui Varanean and baritone Petru Racovita brought vocal warmth and clear articulation to their roles as the maid Suzuki and the American Consul Sharpless. Indeed, Racovita's rich voice rather upstaged everyone about him and made one wish he had more to sing.

Ellen Kent's colourful costumes and unit set of Japanese house and garden were a tad too pretty for the dark ambience of the plot, but her generally lucid staging scored in matters of detail and character interaction. I think she was wrong, though, to have Butterfly's opening phrases sung on stage rather than in the distance as Puccini intended. The small chorus was impressive, and conductor Nicolae Dohotaru paced the action adroitly, maintaining consistently good tonal balance between the singers and his excellent orchestra.

JOHN ALLEN

Elbow

Vicar Street, Dublin

We have been so spoiled by Mick Jagger. He is the archetype every subsequent frontman has had to live up to, and his sex appeal, swagger and, above all, skinny hips have been the template for aspiring singers ever since.

But there is a different way. Elbow's Guy Garvey is proudly, unapologetically, from Bury. He ambles around the stage, shuffling instead of strutting. He fronts a band that, along with Doves and Turin Brakes, were the face of the New Acoustic Movement, the shoegazing of this decade. While the New Acoustic Movement has been swallowed whole by Nu Rave and its ilk, Elbow have admirably persisted in an unashamedly epic style, and their solid new album, The Seldom Seen Kiddemonstrated how they have managed to survive.

Their thoughtful, meditative, meticulous songwriting might sound sumptuous on record, but it runs the risk of being soporific in performance, particularly as the band were bathed in an aquamarine green light for much of the show. But as the crowd gently bop along to their new material, Garvey's strength as a frontman becomes apparent - the Ricky Gervais comparison is impossible to avoid, but unlike Gervais, the sound of Garvey's voice never becomes tiresome, and his jokes are actually funny. Above all, the music is rendered beautifully - Newbornis as dizzyingly magnificent live as it is pristine on record, and as Garvey wanders into the crowd to shake appreciative hands while the band soar through Grace Under Pressure, they showed that there is more than one way to spoil a crowd.

DAVIN O'DWYER