REVIEWS

Reviewed: Tarab, Barockand Portrait, DD Festival

Tarab

John Field Room

Tarab, organised by Francesco Turrisi, the talented Italian pianist and accordionist, provided some of the most enchanting music I've heard yet this year. Assembled purely for this concert, thanks to the combined efforts of the Italian Cultural Institute, the Alliance Française and the Goethe Institute, with the support of the IMC, were Turrisi, Gabrielle Mirabassi (clarinet), Roman Bunka (oud), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass) and Bijan Chemirani (percussion).

The repertoire had a Mediterranean flavour. Italian traditional tunes and popular melody were mixed with classical Arab music and pieces from the Lebanon and Turkey, with even a mournful Jewish klezmer thrown in.

The strengths of music like this, with its odd metres and relatively simple, even basic, harmonies, lie in its qualities of line and rhythm. Where ensemble themes were sketched, this was done in unison; colour came from the tonal qualities of the instruments themselves, while soloists frequently played over a simple repeated figure, rather than changes in the more usual jazz sense, emphasising the demands placed on the imagination of the players by the foregrounding of line and rhythm. With musicians of this calibre, that was no problem.

The opening Sebouni ya mas, a plaintive, slow, classical Arab air, with a beautiful oud solo and some brilliant work, albeit more from the jazz end of the spectrum, from clarinet and piano, also underlined the degree of ensemble unity and balance achieved; remarkable, considering how little rehearsal was possible.

The temptation to gild the lily was also resisted. Melodies already lovely in themselves, like the haunting Attaccati li tricci, arranged by Turrisi, Maor Tzur, a klezmer tune arranged by Nick Roth, and the encore, Tu Bella, were treated with respect.

In between, there were moments to recall with enormous pleasure. The accordion and frame drum brought different colours to the lively Turkish Min Maqam Kurd, with an irresistably swinging closing ensemble; Mirabassi's unaccompanied solo in the transition between Maor Tzur and Renato Carone's Caravan Patrol was an astonishing piece of passionate virtuosity and sustained invention, as was his utterly engaged solo on a Turkish dance, Butcher's Air.

But overall it was an ensemble triumph in which the exotic was embraced for its musical possibilities, not for lack of imagination; quite the reverse, in fact. - RAY COMISKEY

Barock

RIAM, Dublin

The core idea is excellent. The early music vocal ensemble, eX is bringing in international experts for a series of Arts Council-funded workshops, public master classes and concerts.

eX prefers staging an event to simply giving a concert. Their programme of German baroque cantatas under Konrad Junghänel at the Royal Irish Academy of Music on Monday ("settings, David McDermott," "staging, Eric Fraad") involved a pink-haired girl, dressed like a child of the 1960s, playing pre-performance bossy-boots with the singers. She had earlier done slow-motion distribution of oversize concert programmes, which, without texts or translations, could usefully have been accommodated on a quarter the amount of paper. The second half of the evening, the singers mostly abandoning colour for black, was graced by the presence of a large, cloth-draped cross, perhaps to emphasise the import of Johann Hermann Schein's Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund (When on the Cross the Saviour hung).

The impression of a group distracted from the core matter of the music-making was reinforced by constant noises off, some of them created by the comings and goings of the man engaged on videoing the proceedings.

The music-making itself was of the kind that impresses both for its unevenness of delivery and its evident high potential. The repertoire, from Schütz and Schein to Buxtehude, Bruhns and Johann Sebastian and Johann Christoph Bach, was well chosen to provide a variety of musical style and of musical groupings for the four singers of eX, the three guest singers, and a six-player instrumental group.

The current limitations are those of cohesion between voices and instruments, adaptability to shifts in mood and rhythmic movement, and straightforward consistency of delivery.

But when everything gells, there is a resonance and colour, and sometimes a piercing expressiveness that cuts deep. One can only hope that eX will come to the understanding that first things should come first, and, for most people attending concerts, that's still a matter of what they hear rather than what they see. - MICHAEL DERVAN

Portrait, DD Festival

Project, Space Upstairs

The lives in Ioana Mona Popvici's three-part Portrait follow a normal trajectory from childhood to old age, but in the semi-lit ending the five dancers dispel final breaths loaded with guilt and regret. The Romanian choreographer sees blame as a central human condition that begins with childish finger-pointing and ends with the reproachful finger pointing back towards the regretful self.

In Portrait, she skilfully allies this bleak outlook with terrible-twos anima and comically insecure adult bonding: childhood games like blindman's buff become vindictive and the simple seduction between Michael Vodenka and Lea Capkova (they gently butt heads) is ripped apart by a spiteful and jealous Honza Malík. So even though the multi-generational mob mentality enforces conformity and the fear of being different gnaws every action, the choreography's quickly-paced inventiveness distracts for long enough to make the individual loneliness at the end surprising, however inevitable.

As the humans grow old, fish in a suspended tank above the stage provide an un-aging continuum with their symbolism of nature and sexuality. Anna Caunerová emerges after an initial blackout with gasping repeated movements that are punctuated by blowing raspberries at the others. This defiance doesn't last and in the second part - depicting adulthood - the sounds of sparse moody piano replace energetic strings and a cold wash of blue light spreads across the floor. In these more austere surroundings, the adults add gossip to their armour of cruelty, distorted faces turning to another's ear along a line until the individual at the end receives the disproving looks of the rabble.

Portrait is a deceptively simple and engaging work. Popovici has a strong visual sense and the convention of heavily stylised movement creates a distinctive accent as well as an opportunity to create bizarre unisons and group dances. All of the five dancers of Czech company Nanohach add a strong dramatic presence to their sustained physicality, Marta Trpisovská in particular capturing the sense of crumbling ego in her pained face. Although the work's despondency may be slightly overstated, it remains a fable for these paradoxical times where individualism destroys individuality. - MICHAEL SEAVER