Reviews

Reviews of, Gibson, Moroney, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, Callino Quartet and Byrne, Slovak Festival Orchestra/Jablokov

Gibson, Moroney, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet

NCH, John Field Room

Andrew Johnstone

The first of this season's three Composers' Choice programmes at the National Concert Hall was selected, and partly performed, by Irish composer-pianist John Gibson.

In a poised yet sprightly account of Schumann's infectious piano quintet, the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet was joined by pianist Ciara Moroney, whose astute and imperturbable playing marked her out as a thoroughbred chamber musician.

Gibson's playing was warmly colourful yet expressively circumspect in Three Pieces, Op 61, by Michele Esposito, the Italian pianist who exerted a potent influence as professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music from 1882 to 1928.

The thoughtful, spiritual quality of Gibson's own music stems from his use of devices not for their own sake but to establish a desired mood or impression. If Ikon, the title of his third string quartet, suggests Orthodox mysticism á la John Tavener, the reality is less predictably idiomatic, more absorbingly interrogative. The sequence of 10 meditations resembles a set of variations in anxious search of a theme, although the strongly sectionalised music is unified by its fixation on particular notes and intervals.

Musical order and chaos identify compassionately with the tragedy of mental illness in Nijinsky 1998, a piano portrait of the celebrated schizophrenic ballet dancer in which quotations from Debussy, Strauss and Stravinsky are touchingly apposite.

In two other solo piano works of his own, Gibson might have emphasised more strongly the contrasting humours of Proverbs 13:12 and the Latin dash of Moladh go deo le Dia (composed as a test piece for the 2006 Axa Dublin International Piano Competition).

There was sensitive balance, however, to his accompanying of the delicate violin-playing of Gregory Ellis in Three Irish Airs, tasteful essays in the fine art of folk-song arrangement that strike a persuasive balance of concept and sentiment.

Callino Quartet

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Michael Dungan

Beethoven - Quartet in E flat, Op 74.

Frank Corcoran - String Quartet No 3.

György Kurtág - Officium breve.

The Callino Quartet juxtaposed classic and contemporary string quartets in a packed three-work programme for their free one-hour Sundays at Noon concert in the Hugh Lane Gallery.

They opened with Beethoven's Opus 74 ("Harp"), capturing well the gentler, more relaxed mood with which the composer invested it after the rigorous, leading-edge quality of the three "Razumovsky" quartets published two years earlier. In particular, the Callino produced an almost voluptuous smoothness in the lyrical slow movement, though always nicely judged and without overstatement.

Tipperary-born Frank Corcoran was in attendance for the long-overdue Irish premiere of his String Quartet No 3 from 1997. He subtitles it Quasi un quartetto and includes it in a series of works each bearing the Latin prefix quasi, meaning "almost". By what measure the work can only qualify as "almost" a quartet is not immediately clear. It's written in one continuous 15-minute movement which Corcoran describes as a "musical stream of consciousness . . . discharging all the elements of fast, slow, violent, lyrical, dense, thin, total stringiness of filigrane" - which was how the Callino played it, like it says on the tin.

Something the performance lacked, however, was the kind of powerful inner intensity which characterised the playing in the concert's final piece, the 1989 Officium breve, by György Kurtág (his third quartet). Unlike the relentlessness and seeming chaos of the Corcoran, Kurtág's similarly short piece is intricately crafted into miniature movements - 15 of them, some sublimely beautiful - which run a gamut of emotions in response to the death of his friend and fellow composer, Endre Szervánsky. It is, in fact, an instrumental requiem.

Whatever explains the Callino's pronounced leap in intensity between the Corcoran and the Kurtág - whether the score itself or perhaps the ensemble's disposition towards it - this was by some way the best performance of the concert.

Byrne, Slovak Festival Orchestra/Jablokov

NCH, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Just under a year ago, soprano Celine Byrne found herself on the stage of the National Concert Hall for the finals of the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition. In spite of a promising opening, however, she ended up at the wrong end of the field. On Sunday, she returned to the same venue with star billing, in front of the Slovak Festival Orchestra. She was joined by tenor Eugene Ginty, violinist Lynda O'Connor and the Baldonnel Singers as support acts.

The change of circumstances is the result of a success dreamt of by many musicians, first prize at an international competition. Byrne travelled to Athens last March where, at the age of 29, she won the Maria Callas Grand Prix. This wasn't actually her first international success, as she had won the Brabants Dagblad Press Prize at the IVC International Singing Competition in the Netherlands in 2006, but, in the short term, competitions function on the principle that winner takes all, and it's the success in Greece which caused the change in fortune.

Byrne's profile at home has not been all that high, and this was an opportunity to gauge her form over a full programme. From that point of view, the evening was something of a frustration. Without a conductor for the accompanying Slovak Festival Orchestra (led from the first violin by Vladimir Jablokov), and playing cut-down arrangements of arias by Puccini, Dvørák, Gounod, Catalani, Verdi, Lehár and Johann Strauss, the event was rather hit and miss. The use of sound reinforcement for the singer made it difficult to judge the natural scope of her voice, which, in the circumstances, sometimes came across as one of the largest ever to have been heard on the stage of the NCH.

The soprano herself came across as one of those performers who likes singing, can do it without apparent effort, and has solid, if not particularly subtle, musical sense. Singing is usually presented as the most natural of musical activities, yet this is not the impression that most opera singers give in performance. Byrne seems to be one of the happy exceptions, and I certainly look forward to hearing her again.