Reviews

Irish Times journalists look at what is happening in the arts

Kirshbaum, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet

National Gallery, Dublin

Seóirse Bodley - String Quartet No 4.

Ronan Guilfoyle - Music for String Quartet.

Deirdre Gribbin - Merrow Sang.

Schubert - String Quintet.

The culminating programme of the Vanbrugh Quartet's Focus on Schubert series was also the focus of the quartet's 21st-anniversary celebrations. Three new works specially commissioned from Irish composers made for a rich birthday cake, and it was iced by the co-opting of celebrated cellist Ralph Kirshbaum for Schubert's crowning chamber work, the Quintet in C.

The Quintet's ebulliences were ripe and gutsy, with a visceral emphasis to the first movement's crowded bugle-calls and a breathless charge to the finale's finish.

It was the quieter moments, though, that made the deepest impressions, not just in the core Adagio, but in the more delicate corners of the finale, in a notably dark and atmospheric trio to the Scherzo, and in some deliciously persuasive handling of the mercurial tonalities.

Discerning commissioning had yielded three diverse new pieces for the Vanbrugh Quartet. Seóirse Bodley's Quartet No 4 is an avowedly anti-modernist statement, particularly in its espousal of warmly consonant harmony. Yet its apparent exclusion of traditional formal and thematic processes places it firmly in the present.

Its two compact movements have similar levels of activity, keep an audible pulse in abeyance, and work their halting way through an array of fleeting ideas.

In contrast, Ronan Guilfoyle's Music for String Quartet subjects pithy and distinctive materials to carefully timed repetitions and developments that are satisfyingly assimilable on a first hearing. Nursery tunes jostle with sometimes surly accompaniments and occasional hints of violence, so that the sweet and the spicy are often combined in one musical mouthful.

For sheer loveliness of sound, however, there could be no beating the piece that, of all three, owed least to classical notions of form and treatment, Deirdre Gribbin's Merrow Sang. Nor was this exquisitely original work merely a feast for the ears: its integration of concept and effect made it a feast too for the imagination.

Andrew Johnstone

Bah! Humbug!

Lyric, Belfast

'Tis the season to be jolly or, depending on your point of view, it may be more a case of "bah! humbug!". For those of the latter persuasion, Conor Grimes and Alan McKee's maniacally jaundiced view of these days of holly and tinselry will be right up their street. This year, the object of their ridicule is the Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. With deceptive skill, they have crafted a cautionary tale of property developer Ebenezer Scrooge, who spends his days exploiting the vulnerable and his nights holed up in his luxury penthouse watching Wall Street and reciting the "greed is good" mantra. If anyone deserves to be given the fright of his life by passing spooks, it's this guy. His current fixation is the sale of a scandalously overpriced development of townhouses and apartments, while his sidekick, Bob Cratchit, is more interested in using the Christmas club money to buy a mini-quad for fat spoilt brat Tiny Tim.

The merry dance is directed with dash and brio by John Breen, who knows how to milk every drop of humour out of the merest snigger, not to mention those sequences where there is more filler than filling.

Grimes and McKee are in grand form, cutting loose shamelessly, aided and abetted by their old stamping partner, Frankie McCafferty, as Scrooge, a man whose facial expression is permanently fixed on the act of sucking a lemon. Niki Doherty and Patrick J O'Reilly double and treble up in the familiar roles and, with Grimes, are unsettlingly believable as the hard-drinking, God-fearing Falls Road Cratchits.

In tandem with the wholesome happiness of The Wizard of Oz, this is set to do sellout business for the Lyric.

Runs until Jan 12

Jane Coyle

ConTempo Quartet

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Rob Canning - Melencolia I.

Ed Bennett - For James Ferrada.

David Flynn - String Quartet No 3.

Jane O'Leary - ConTempo ConVersations.

This concert featured the premieres of new works for string quartet by three Irish composers who took part in workshops organised by the ConTempo String Quartet and the Contemporary Music Centre. All three pieces were gloomy. Another common characteristic was a mismatch of varying degrees between interesting musical ideas and the structures created to present them.

The opening work for example, Rob Canning's Melencolia I for string quartet, live electronics and quadraphonic sound, felt too long at 20 minutes. This was despite the fact that there was a great deal of complex activity, which Canning gamely attempted to explain in the printed programme with a note that was fascinating but opaque. It was virtually impossible to connect what you were reading with what you were hearing.

But what you were hearing was good. As the title suggests, the piece was brooding and dark, affectingly sad, a great wash of emotion-laden sound somehow, perhaps ingeniously, generated by a semi-indeterminate score with rules for the performers involving fragments of music printed in magic squares. Emerging from the general texture were isolated pizzicato plucks and slow, sliding glissandi which heightened the effect.

For James Ferrada is Ed Bennett's musical response to the premature death of a friend and fellow composer. As an expressive flash of anger and anxiety, it is spot on with its bleakness and its percussive drive. But again, it was, to my ears, a little over-extended.

I would venture the same opinion on parts of David Flynn's String Quartet No 3, An Caoineadh (The Keening), inspired by the Irish traditional singing style associated with mourning. Length aside, the piece is notable for evoking the ancient via relatively modern string techniques that remain new sounding. Flynn has successfully appropriated something from Irish traditional music without any hint of "Celtic twilight" crossover style.

The concert ended with a short piece not from the workshops. Jane O'Leary's bag of tricks, ConTempo ConVersations, was a playful five-minute tour of string quartet vocabulary that brought a welcome mood change.

The Romanian ConTempo Quartet - Galway's ensemble in residence since 2003 - was versatile and persuasive in a programme containing a wide stylistic range.

Michael Dungan