Reviews

Review including Patrick O'Keeffe Traditional Music Festivalin Castleisland, Co Kerry and  Alessandro Bosettiat Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

Patrick O'Keeffe Traditional Music Festival, Castleisland, Co Kerry

Populated by veterans of Hall's Pictorial Weekly, box players from west Kerry, belly deep singers from Dublin, Caherciveen and Valentia, and a slew of superb musicians whose roots stretched the length and breadth of that mythical bordered place known as Sliabh Luachra, the 15th Patrick O'Keeffe traditional music festival reconstituted an annual magic that's all its own over four glorious days and nights of the bank holiday weekend.

At its core is a love for the slow airs, reels and polkas of one of the finest fiddle teachers ever to travel a country mile. Patrick O'Keeffe's legend might be as fabled as the Sliabh Luachra landscape he inhabited, but this festival is too busy keeping a weather eye on the quality of its musical roster to get waylaid by his heroic biography.

Paddy Cronin and Seamus Creagh traded fiddle tunes in Con's bar with the generosity of players hellbent on bequeathing a limitless legacy to their fellow session players, who had travelled from as far afield as Japan and Gneeveguilla, neither a journey to be undertaken by the faint-hearted.

Shifting their two weekend concerts to the Ivy Leaf Arts Centre was an inspired decision, and on Sunday night, as well as honouring the magnificent Kiskeam fiddler, Maurice O'Keeffe (a man who's no stranger to that fine-bowed, haunting Sliabh Luachra fiddle style), the stage was subsumed by a tsunami of sublime players. From Melanie Murphy's light-fingered playing (on both concertina and fiddle), revelling in the wink and elbow language of delight at the turning of every tune alongside her father, Dónal and bouzouki player, Brian Mooney to the ferocious eclecticism of Sligo flute player, Peter Horan, Kerry fiddler, Gerry Harrington and Dublin piper, Peter Browne, there were more magical moments in time than were ever captured by the Brothers Grimm. Niamh Parsons and Graham Dunne filled the ether with a spellbinding tale of the madness of war, John Condon, every molecule in Parsons' body vibrating in between Dunne's pinprick accompaniment.

More Ivy League than Ivy Leaf, this was a festival that distilled the essence of O'Keeffe's genius: note by shimmering note. Siobhán Long

Alessandro Bosetti, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Bosetti - Zwölfzungen (exc)

This one-hour, one-man concert presented new music based on an interesting and promising premise by Italian composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti (b. 1973). His "instrument", in the manner of musique concrete, is recordings he has made of found sounds. For his project Zwölfzungen- the noise of languages, all his found sounds are people speaking languages he doesn't speak himself. His interest is purely in the sounds of these languages, not in understanding them.

His opening extract - No 11 entitled " Longwaves" - gave a good illustration of the principle. It blended recordings of a South African woman speaking Zulu and Xhosa - both of which employ palatal clicks like the ones kids use to imitate a clock ticking - with his own live clicking which he then manipulated electronically until it became layered, rapid-fire percussion. Eventually he added a long, single-note drone which he sang as the piece petered out. Six minutes: one man, a voice on tape, a laptop, a microphone and speakers.

The next extract - No 5 " Restless" - played with what little is familiar to most westerners about Mandarin: that it goes up and down in a fast and fluid sing-song manner. Bosetti's tape featured a woman speaking Mandarin in slow-motion, the sing-song reduced to laboured glissandi and sudden changes of pitch. He sang along, adding some deep percussion and electronics. Another six minutes.

Other extracts included el silbo, a long-range whistling language from the Canary Islands; a woman whispering a mantra-like phrase in Urdu accompanied by what sounded like morse code pips; and a language he invented himself based on phonetic transcriptions of the whoops and slides you hear when you tune a shortwave radio.

I don't ever remember being so simultaneously intrigued and impatient. Bosetti's material and premise are wonderful, and his compositional interventions work very well. But in most cases they were in need of some kind of direction, development or structure, anything to prevent them from becoming - as they threatened to do - just a series of six-minute mesmeric sonic textures. Michael Dungan

Ute Lemper/Robert Ziegler/RTÉCO, National Concert Hall

Die sieben Todsünden, the last major Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaboration, is a ballet-cantata about a dancer sent by her family on a seven-year fundraising odyssey through seven American cities, in each of which she is tempted by one of the eponymous deadly sins.

In concert at the NCH, Ute Lemper sang the role created in 1933 by Weill's soprano wife Lotte Lenya. This is the vocal half of the protagonist, a character whose personality is split between singer Anna I and dancer Anna II. The family is a male quartet, here drawn from the excellent Synergy Vocals, in which the mother is a deep bass.

Ute Lemper is surely the direct descendant of Lotte Lenya, or at any rate of the downwardly transposed vocal persona that Weill's widow re-created for herself in the 1950s. But Lemper is no mere Lenya imitator, she is a supreme communicator in her own right, an artist whose sour-sweet voice and cutting expressiveness bring vibrant bitterness and sly sensuality to Weill's melodies. And her adroit use of word colouring exploits fully the dramatic potential of Brecht's cynically ironic and/or world-weary lyrics.

All these assets were there, too, in the remainder of the programme, now augmented by flashes of wit and added passion. The latter occasionally compromised the clarity of the singer's diction, and one or two of the arrangements and key modulations raised the odd eyebrow. We had multi-lingual renderings of five more Weill excerpts, angst-ridden numbers by Ástor Piazzolla and Jacques Brel, and Berlin cabaret songs by Weill's contemporaries Mischa Spoliansky and Frederick Hollander.

Lemper was strongly partnered throughout by Robert Ziegler, who conducted the ever-versatile RTÉCO with verve and a sure feeling for the varied styles involved. - John Allen

Amiina, The Button Factory, Dublin

In the venue formerly known as the Temple Bar Music Centre, a thundery backdrop slowly builds as four women pick their way on to a packed stage. There is barely room to move for musical instruments (we're later informed 136 strings have to be tuned for each gig) and two begin slowly to drag violin bows over the edges of a xylophone and a glockenspiel. The effect is eerie and the audience holds its breath, mesmerised.

Welcome to the enchanting world of Amiina. Until their debut, Kurr, was released this year, the Icelandic group were best known as the string section for Sigur Rós. Like their countrymen, they conjure up melancholic postcards of home with compositions that beguile. Listening to the album is one thing, but hearing - and seeing - their music live is unforgettable. Although each has a trade instrument - María (violin), Hildur (violin), Edda (viola) and Sólrún (cello) - there are at least 30 instruments on stage. A laptop, providing loops and metronomic beats, houses another handful and a touring drummer provides percussion.

Watching the quartet move around, swapping instruments, means it's hard to take your eyes off the stage. Logistics aside, the music is what people have come for and, dipping generously into Kurr, they don't disappoint. Amiina favour layers that sound off-the-cuff, but are obviously scrupulously scored. Rugla starts with xylophone and guitar before a pitch-bending saw appears. On Boga, singing wine glasses are slowly joined by a kalimba and cello while Sogg is driven by hand-played desk bells.

Shyly they tell us they love playing Dublin and joke about being unused to the humidity. After a wall of accordion, harp, trombone, hand-held keyboards and strings, two encores included Ammaelis, a playful Casio-beat number and a short piece with all four playing saws.

With dimmed lights, Amiina's soporific tunes entranced a respectfully hushed audience before sending them home to bed with a head full of blissed-out nursery chimes. Sinead Gleeson