Reviews

Reviewed: Glenn Branca, Conor Linehan (piano) Feeley, Caulfield, RTÉ NSO/Dinur Narucki,and Madzar, ICO/Marwood

Glenn BrancaAnalog, Grand Canal Square

Glenn Branca is infuriatingly adept at pushing out the musical envelope, and has been at the heart of contemporary musical innovation for decades. As a composer, he is obsessed with the mathematics behind the musical process, and exults in deconstructing tuning systems and harmonics in order to write music that is almost clinical in its construction. His epic compositions leave everything else in their wake sounding frail, delicate and brittle.

This piece, his 13th Symphony, Hallucination City, was originally commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and performed at the World Trade Centre in June 2001, which is eerie given how it sounds. It has spent the summer touring around Europe, and in each city 100 local guitarists were recruited through a website, with a prerequisite that they could read sheet music.

The performance, part of the impressive Analogue festival in Dublin's revamped docklands, didn't quite manage 100 guitarists, but still managed to probably be unlike anything you have heard before, unless you live under a commercial flight path. The music bursts forth from the stage in a thunderous announcement, tearing into the audience like a violent storm. It makes no apologies and ascends and descends at a blistering pace. There is no room here for soloists; this a monstrous, rolling beast of a sound, soaring at a relentless pace that makes conversation impossible and leaves the audience reeling. The organisers warned that this event was not suitable for children, and they weren't lying: the music has little melody, instead relying on swelling tides of dissonance and harsh noise, layered over furious, frantic strumming, with pounding percussion driving the industrial-sized vehicle that careens along at a breakneck pace.

For all its disconcerting edges, this is thrilling stuff and slightly terrifying. There are no brief respites in the shape of melodic breakdowns; it is a broiling angry piece of composition, with thunderous guitar crescendos, clambering and scrabbling over each other, at one point sounding like pianos being dropped from a height and, inevitably, like aircraft plunging into the earth.

This was always going to be a performance of ragged edges and dark hues, and Branca, along with conductor John Myers, seem delighted with the performance. Overall it's a fascinating, ambitious undertaking that is challenging, disturbing and brilliant to behold. Love it or hate it, it's almost certainly impossible to define it. - Laurence Mackin

Conor Linehan (piano)NCH, John Field Room, Dublin

Mozart - Rondo in A minor. Chopin - Four Ballades

Though he's perhaps best known as a nifty theatre composer, the versatile Conor Linehan remains strongly committed to the canon of classical piano. This lunchtime programme was no trivial undertaking, and it hadn't been short on preparation.

The jazz-player's firmness of touch never seemed far away in Mozart's wistful Rondo in A minor, where the linear writing overcame a certain pointillism only in the closing bars. Despite some freedoms with the composer's clear-cut dynamic scheme, the interpretation was level-headed, almost to a point of coolness.

With Chopin, too, Linehan was careful never to over-indulge in the expressive and sustaining capabilities of the Steinway grand. The fiery passages of Ballade No 2 radiated light more than heat, and the swinging rhythms of No 3 developed a characterful lopsidedness that soon became convincing.

While accuracy may in general have taken priority over poignancy, Linehan's command of the adrenaline in the rushing culmination of Ballade No 4, and more particularly in that of No 3, revealed a pianism notable for much more than just good clean virtuosity. - Andrew Johnstone

Feeley, Caulfield, RTÉ NSO/Dinur NCH, Dublin

Chabrier - España. Bizet - Carmen Suite No 1. Rodrigo - Concierto de Aranjuez. Saint-Saëns - Organ Symphony

It came as no surprise that this concert by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under the young Israeli conductor Yaniv Dinur was a sell-out. There were plenty of incentives to go to it. One crowd-puller was the selection from Carmen, with its stable companion España thrown in for good measure. Though Chabrier's Iberian cross-rhythms may have erred on the heavy side, in both items the execution had great dash, the languorous melodies were coaxing, and the woodwind solos sparkled.

Another attraction was Saint-Saëns's Symphony No 3 - a work seemingly calculated to defy Berlioz's dictum that the organ and the orchestra, like the Pope and the Emperor, should never be in the same place at the same time.

Thanks to the diplomacy of organist Fergal Caulfield, the potential conflict of similarities was avoided, although at some cost to the majesty of his monolithic chords.

The rapid note repetitions that bristle through the symphony's faster portions were at their tidiest in the scherzo, whose first presto section was reached by a secure transition.

Following a spirited sonata Allegro and a ponderous Adagio, Dinur's vision of the finale tended less towards the invigoratingly neo-Baroque than the grandiosely romantic, with the anapaestic counterpoint issuing forth with much weight.

In Rodrigo's unassuming but much loved Concierto de Aranjuez, solo guitarist John Feeley ranged across a wealth of tone colours from the chaste and lute-like to the pungent and prickly. So silent were his position changes, so crisply regular his strummings, that there was little cause to regret the hefty yet clear amplification.

Of the many good reasons for attending this concert, then, it was Feeley's masterly playing that proved best of all. - Andrew Johnstone

Narucki, Madzar, ICO/MarwoodMBNA Shannon International Music Festival

György Kurtág - Doodles. Bach - Wedding cantata. Mendelssohn - Concerto for violin and piano. Schumann - Träumerei. Frank Corcoran - Quasi una fuga. Beethoven - Grosse Fuge

A bit of everything was the pattern of the Irish Chamber Orchestra's programme at St Mary's Cathedral, Limerick.

The opening piece, Doodles, from Hungarian composer György Kurtág's Signs, Games and Messages, made full use of the cathedral acoustic, locating players around and out of sight of the audience. The piece, in typical Kurtág fashion, is like a kind of musical shard - tiny, but extraordinary in what it refracts.

Programming Bach's Wedding cantata, Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, with US soprano Susan Narucki, served to show the distance the orchestra has travelled in Baroque music since Anthony Marwood replaced Nicholas McGegan as artistic director. The direction of travel has been away from period performance style and towards the middle ground. This performance, which Marwood directed from the violin, was attractive in general outline, but lacked the sharpness of gesture and shape that McGegan brought to this repertoire. Narucki sang with attractive tone, but mostly undecipherable words.

Mendelssohn was just 14 when he wrote his exuberant Concerto in D minor for violin, piano and strings. It's an astonishingly precocious work of the kind that shows a youngster testing and flexing his musical muscles. To my ears, it always sounds like frothy frolic that says very little but at too great a length. The young composer had yet to learn the disciplines of compactness.

For spirit and drive, however, it's not to be faulted, although its actual content is often very thin indeed, even when played with the perceptive virtuosity that Anthony Marwood and pianist Aleksandar Madzar brought to it. Never mind the quality, was the message, just tune in to the excitement and the buzz.

The evening's last three works presented very varied approaches to writing for strings. The uncredited arrangement of Schumann's Trüumerei was smooth as velvet. Frank Corcoran's new Quasi una fuga treated a mid-20th-century ambience (Bartók, Lutoslawski) with a kind of modern, knowing wilfulness, the rising swirls of his material sometimes granulated, sometimes exploded in a way that managed to sound familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge - no quasi-qualifications about the title here - is surely one of the most uncompromising and 20th-century sounding of works to have emerged from the 19th century. Its most consistent characteristic, for both players and listeners, is a sense of overload, of more being attempted than can possibly be achieved. Marwood directed a performance that had a few rough edges but that also, more than many orchestral treatments of this string quartet, unflaggingly held on to the knotty core of the composer's grand vision. - Michael Dervan