Reviews

A look at the world of the arts through the eyes of Irish Times journalists.

A look at the world of the arts through the eyes of Irish Timesjournalists.

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry House

Friday was Polina Leschenko day at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. This young St Petersburg pianist is a protege of the great Martha Argerich, and her festival debut in cello sonatas by Mendelssohn and Grieg with David Cohen made clear why and how she has been making waves.

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She has an exceptionally thorough command of piano sonority. There's not a moment in her playing that sounds idle or humdrum. There's a high emotional charge, too, which is as apparent in her creation and moulding of moments of cushioned softness as in her flights of incisive virtuosity.

Neither Mendelssohn's Sonata in D, Op. 58, nor Grieg's Sonata in A minor, Op. 36, offer anything like top-notch musical experiences. Leschenko has both the lightness of finger and the rich vein of musical fantasy to prevent the neat and tidy finish of the Mendelssohn sounding four-square.

The succession of ideas in the Grieg can make the piece sound like a disconnected, unmotivated hotch-potch. Leschenko lived fully in the moment, see-sawing from the tender to the explosive. And if it seems odd that the pianist gets first mention in a programme of two cello sonatas, that's because, as heard at Bantry, Leschenko is also a domineering musical personality.

Cohen sounded like a fine-grained musician, with a sure command of honeyed tone, and naturally lyrical musical responses. But there was no escaping the fact that, especially in the Grieg, Leschenko took the lion's share of attention.

The day also included two clarinet quartets. The first was a dryish one with fascinating grafts of high-grade, gritty modernism written by Paul Hindemith in 1938 for clarinet (Sharon Kam) and piano trio (Catherine Leonard, violin, Peter Bruns, cello, Finghin Collins, piano).

The 1993 Clarinet Quartetby Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki is for clarinet and string trio (Hartmut Rohde on viola replacing Collins on piano). It's a fully expressed essay in latter-day romanticism by a composer who can recapture the functions of melody and harmony that were shunned by many composers in the 20th century, while at the same time sounding fully of his own time. Both performances were gripping.

The day opened with a frisky account of Beethoven's early Clarinet Trio (Kam, Bruns and Collins), but the best-known composers fared less well later in the day. The rarefied style of late Fauré quite eluded Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov in the composer's Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 108. Faust played Bach's Partita in D minorfor solo violin in a way that was lithe and mechanically efficient, but narrow in expressive range to the point of being soulless. - Michael Dervan

Patrick street

Áras Chrónán,

Slowly, imperceptibly almost, they built up a head of steam. Patrick Street are the noughties' answer to the Bothy Band and Planxty: a quintet of master musicians whose molecules have merged so intrinsically with the music that it's hard to tell musician and music apart.

The coalition of Burke and Carthy's fiddles is a magical one, Burke leading and driving, Carthy dropping the subtlest of killer punches underneath, in between and just occasionally on top of the tune, all the better to savour every nuance of its colour palette. Carthy's on-stage impassivity (like a Mafioso on midnight watch) is the perfect foil for his renaissance-like playing, swapping between fiddle, banjo and flute as though he was simply shifting gear on a long and winding road.

Andy Irvine's song choices are a conundrum of Confucian proportions. Nobody else in the folk music firmament could get away with airing such a profusion of lonesome laments, and still he manages to infuse them with just the right balance of vulnerability and regret to elevate their credibility to heights which, on the face of it, the lyrics simply don't deserve. So it is with The Rich Irish Lady(borrowed from Peggy Seeger): what could have been a maudlin dirge sprouts gossamer wings, courtesy of that inimitable Irvine magic.

Elsewhere, Ged Foley shone on The Diamantina Drover, shored up by Carthy and Burke's intricate fiddle lines and Irvine's spacious harmonica, each instrument conjuring a perfect landscape of drought and desiccation, in keeping with the antipodean geography of the lyric.

They may have struggled to build momentum initially, but once Patrick Street had navigated a pathway through Music For A Found Harmoniumand The King Of Ballyhooley, we knew we were in the presence of greatness. Later came a heady dose of slides, followed by The Newmarket Polkas, because, as Jackie Daly reminded us, "polkas without slides is like a Kerry dinner without spuds". Unconscionable propositions both. - Siobhán Long

Divino Pastor Gongora

Municipal Hall, Kinsale

It says something for the apparent simplicity of Divino Pastor Gongorathat the production by Mexico's El Teatro del Mar fits easily into the accommodation provided by Kinsale's Municipal Hall. Admittedly as a location this pastiche of Victorian Gothic is theatrical in itself, sitting on a shelf of the town's cliff jutting over the SUV-choked streets and offering a glorious view of the harbour with its inglorious hilltop architecture and its evening harvest of yachts gliding into their moorings. Such outside attractions might be expected to make it difficult for the Kinsale Arts Week programmers to draw people indoors, and on the face of it a Spanish-speaking fat man in a blanket and a wide-brimmed hat is not much of an attraction on an evening of rare warmth and sunshine. But give me that sunshine again, that view, a glass of wine, an evening at Fishy Fishy - and I'd sacrifice them all for Divino Pastor Gongora. Simplicity indeed!

Here is a prisoner of the Inquisition, sometime in the 18th or 19th century, an actor condemned for inciting rebellion by his part in a play. He confesses to being an actor,, protesting that he only took the role because of his infatuation with a legendary actress.

He was so in love with her that all he read of the incendiary play was his own one short line - but that was to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, or at least of revolt. Not a good idea in those days when Mexico was still "New Spain" and theatre was still under the cosh of both court and Inquisition. Even so, this is a trumped-up charge: Gongora's real crime is the impregnation of the magistrate's niece.

History, passion, poverty, fear, faith and desperation form the pattern of this fractured but coherent narrative written by Jaime Chabaud. The hat, the blanket, even the gravelled flooring accompany the fluent hands of Carlos Cobos, whose voice can sing as well as rave, whose body can sag with despair or domineer in the postures and rhythms of flamenco. Directed by Miguel Angel Rivera, Cobos is also assisted by the baroque guitar of Julio Cruz and by the fluid lighting design by Xochitl Gonzalez in a piece which is ripe with allegory and which, even as sub-titles flow onto the staging screens, is much much more than a solitary fat man with a wide-brimmed hat and a blanket. - Mary Leland

Megiddo, RTÉ NSO/Markson

NCH, Dublin

Mendelssohn - Midsummer Night's Dream (exc).

Bloch - Schelomo.

Mozart - Symphony No 40.

Setting Ernest Bloch's darkly imposing Hebraic rhapsody Schelomo(Solomon) amid the more classical surroundings of Mozart and Mendelssohn brought a disparate feel to Friday's concert by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under principal conductor Gerhard Markson.

Though the balances were consistently satisfactory in Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dreamand Mozart's G minor symphony, a sense of continuity and connectedness between strings and winds was lacking - perhaps because the strings were more numerous than either composer envisaged.

The intra-orchestral dialogue seemed finally to develop, however, in the last played movement of the incidental music, Dance of the Clowns.

It was, however, the awesome Schelomothat dominated the evening's experience, not least because of the impassioned and oratorical solo playing of Israeli-born cellist Inbal Megiddo.

Composed in 1916, Bloch's sternly expressionistic 20-minute tableau might be seen as an assertively devout response to Kol Nidrei, the altogether milder Jewish essay for cello and orchestra by Christian composer Bruch.

Megiddo's tone production may have been more at the chamber-music than the symphonic level, and the orchestral trappings might sometimes have been more subdued. But her line was so imbued with a quasi-vocal physicality, her empathy with the music's religious ardour so certain, and her expression so untrammelled, that nothing could come between the artist and her audience. - Andrew Johnstone