Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review performances from the world of the arts.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Barenboim

NCH, Dublin

Schubert - Symphony No 5.

Bruckner - Symphony No 4 (Romantic).

Wednesday's programme from the Vienna Philharmonic was a programme of music by men who were underdogs in their lifetimes.

The men performing it (and men they mostly were, as the Vienna Philharmonic still includes less than a handful of women) are widely esteemed as being at the top of their profession. And the man in charge, Daniel Barenboim, could accurately be described as a kind of über-conductor.

Barenboim, through his marriage to the legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pré, became part of the best-known classical music couple of the 1960s and 1970s.

He's been in the international headlines for having been sacked as artistic director of the new Bastille Opera in Paris before the house even opened. He dared to conduct Wagner in concert in Israel. He chose to walk away from the musical directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, citing issues with "non-artistic duties", and seamlessly managed to substitute a principal guest conductorship at Milan's La Scala to the post of general music director of the Berlin Staatsoper, which he has held since 1992.

Musically, he has always remained a romantic - a youthful encounter with the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler seems to have left an indelible impression. He's already been heard in Bruckner at the National Concert Hall, when his conducting of the Eighth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1996 offered a sonic experience to be cherished.

The Vienna Philharmonic is a more ravishingly beautiful sounding orchestra than its Chicago counterpart, and Barenboim exploited to the full its cushioned string tone and distinctive wind colourings. His is a heavily fingerprinted Bruckner. On Wednesday, the moments of greatest success in the composer's Fourth Symphony were more in passages of quiet mystery than in the music's great blazes of glory.

The conductor's micro-manipulations, always fascinating in themselves, had a tempering effect on what you might call the rule-breaking directness, the bluntness, even, of Bruckner's vision. It was in the third movement, the famous hunting-call Scherzo, that the music-making sounded at its most straightforward and at its musical best.

Schubert's Fifth Symphony is one of the most genuinely genial and buoyant of classical symphonies. Wednesday's performance was light on its toes, but not quite sprung with the energy nor lit with the transparency which that lightness certainly suggested. - Michael Dervan

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Mill Theatre, Dundrum

Edward Albee's classic play is still the definitive portrayal of marriage as a vehicle of psychological destruction. On one drunken evening-into-morning, a middle-aged professor (George) and his older wife (Martha) flay each other to the bone in front of their young guests Nick and Honey. In the process, the secret of their relationship is exposed in a traumatic revelation.

The principal roles have been played by some of the finest actors of stage and screen, and the odious comparison is hard to avoid. Its searching beam is bound to be directed at the two male leads, whose theatre background is essentially that of the musical stage. Garry Mountaine tackles George, Paul Byrom takes on Nick. What are the odds? The gamble, if such it be, pays off handsomely. From the start, Mountaine's shambling figure projects the pain of his wife's contempt for his failures in work and life. As the drinking persists through the hours, his bitter resentments come to boiling point.

Paul Byrom is a dramatically vital Nick, the young academic on the make, moving from polite guest to stripped-down antagonist. His duels with George teeter on the edge of violence, and his drunken dalliance with Martha betrays his shallow allegiances. Mary Tobin as his twittering wife is just right.

Aisling Ardiff's Martha is not quite on the target, looking and sounding more like a nagging housewife than a sadistic shrew. Dara Carolan directs a production that, reservations notwithstanding, deserves its audiences. - Gerry Colgan

Frank Bungarten (guitar)

John Field Room (NCH)

T Wilson - Soliloquy

Ohana - Tiento

Hans Werner Henze - Royal Winter Music: Sonata No 1

This concert supported Frank Bungarten's reputation as a guitarist who commands attention by doing things in an individual, profoundly musical way.

It was the first in the Music 21 series (formerly Mostly Modern) that, since the closure of the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, has transferred mainly to the National Concert Hall.

All three works on this programme were written within the last 50 years, and only Ohana's Tiento(1957) was evidently indebted to traditional guitar techniques.

Nevertheless, it presses the boundaries of method and expectation, and proved an excellent work to follow Thomas Wilson's Soliloquy(1969), which cleverly and almost completely avoids historical associations via dense 12-note counterpoint, in which lyricism is never far below the surface.

Perhaps the most striking and demanding demonstration of Bungarten's individuality and ability was his performance of the first of the two multi-movement sonatas (1975) from Henze's Royal Winter Music. These musical portraits of Shakespearean characters draw on a vast range of historical styles and genres, instrumental and vocal, and are replete with the dramatic flair for which this composer is famous.

It was therefore striking that Bungarten underplayed external drama in favour of a purely musical discourse that depended on impeccable timing and command of colour.

He hardly moved; and because he drew his audience into his own intimate relationship with this knotty music, he made it seem unusually and memorably accessible.

His faint smile at the end of the beautifully played "Ophelia" movement was a rare glimpse of his awareness that this was a high-class, self-sufficient performance. - Martin Adams

• The series continues on Friday at 1.05pm in the John Field Room, with Darragh Morgan (violin) and Mary Dullea (piano). For details telephone 01-4170000, or visit http://www.music21.ie/