Still hooked on glam

Reviews include Duran Duran at the Point, Composer's Choice with Marion Ingoldsby at the NCH, Emmet Byrne and Rebecca Cap at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre and the Ulster Orchestra with Celso Antunes at the Ulster Hall.

Duran Duran

The Point, Dublin

Peter Crawley

You can't go back, of course, but try telling that to Simon Le Bon. Strutting around his circular stage, shoulder pads slicing the air, Le Bon triumphantly welcomes us to "the first show this band has played in this country in over 15 years". But in fact this incarnation of Duran Duran have never played here.

With this decade already resembling an over-elaborate 1980s revival - resurrecting the music, fashions and global politics of the Reagan years - a rift has opened in the space-time continuum. For Duran Duran, everywhere must feel like a homecoming.

Lest it seem that rolled-up suit-sleeves, unisex make-up application and a yacht in every driveway are again the standard desires of a whole new generation, the audience comprised not new fans, but rather old friends.

Adoring screams are dutifully dusted down and affixed to the "do-do-dos" of Hungry Like a Wolf, or the more thought-provoking "bop-bop-bops" on Planet Earth. But when Le Bon offers the mawkishly forlorn ballad Come Undone to "young lovers" it provokes an unexpected ripple of sniggering. Thousands of school disco memories have flooded back, or perhaps the irony wars of the 1990s linger on: these romantics are anything but new.

Fresher material is benignly tolerated, eased along by reassuringly daft video displays; Duran Duran emerging, delectably, from the petals of flowers, or rendered in absurdly violent Manga. MTV is now a celebrity documentary channel, and is a poorer place without them.

The Reflex, Wild Boys, Girls on Film and a grandstanding Rio may course with the amperage of nostalgia, but they snag us still with their sharp hooks. Trust Duran Duran, architects of a decade as solid as powder, to sniff out its substance without messing up their style.

Composers' Choice/Marian Ingoldsby

NCH, John Field Room, Dublin

Michael Dervan

It's hard to imagine a composer more self-effacing as a speaker than Marian Ingoldsby, who featured in the last of this year's Composers' Choice concerts at the National Concert Hall. Yet the messages she conveyed were perfectly clear.

What she really likes in music, she said, is harmony, and the sense it can bring of going somewhere. She is also stimulated by instrumental colour, concerned about drama and structure, and appreciates brevity.

All of this was reflected in the character of the programme she chose - Webern's epigrammatic Three Little Pieces for cello and piano, The Lake for solo piano by the Catalan miniaturist Federico Mompou, the quiet rapture of the closing movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, the highly theatrical recorder piece, Black Intention, by the Japanese composer Maki Ishii, Henry Cowell's evocative Aeolian Harp, a 1923 exploration of the possibilities of working under the piano lid, and Aaron Copland's Vitebsk, a rebarbative study for piano trio that must surely shock listeners who only know the composer's familiar, tuneful ballet scores.

The performances were mixed. William Butt's slightly larger than life cello playing didn't quite connect with Thérèse Fahy's aptly light-fingered responses to the Webern. Violinist Michael d'Arcy didn't find the necessary inner intensity for the Messiaen, and Vitebsk sounded as if the three players were reluctant to take Copland in discordantly gritty mode at face value.

On the other hand, Thérèse Fahy found an attractive dreaminess in the Mompou, and Kate Hearne brought the house down in the theatrical black and whiteness of the Ishii.

Ingoldsby represented herself through two premières. The Four Nye Songs (2000), to texts by Robert Nye, were sung with bewildering straightness by soprano Lynda Lee, who made a beautiful sound and sang with confidence, but gave little sense of connecting with the words or the delicate dissonances, sometimes falling like sporadic raindrops, of the piano writing.

The specially commissioned piano piece About Five (the title has something to do with the boredom of being caught in rush hour) is very laid back, with a retro feel and an air, at certain times, of improvisation.

It sounded straight, yet it seemed somehow elusive, provoking that most essential of first responses, a curiosity to hear it again.

Emmet Byrne (oboe), Rebecca Cap (piano)

Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin

Martin Adams

Schumann - Three Romances Op 94 Novellette Op 21 No 8

Poulenc - Oboe Sonata

Dring - Italian Dance

Both musicians in this concert were born in Ireland and have spent several years studying at the Hochschule für Music in Cologne. Their playing showed some of the best characteristics of Germanic training at this level a maturity and earnest engagement with the music.

Emmet Byrne is one of those rare oboists who seems incapable of making an ugly sound, and who shows little sign of the effort involved in creating such long-breathed phrasing and delicately varied colour. His view of Schumann's Three Romances Op. 94 captured the composer's characteristic blend of fantasy and precise intellect.

Equally noticeable was the absence of something that so many young players seem compelled to do. Not once did they try to convince by means other than the purely musical. Even in Poulenc's Oboe Sonata, which offers so many opportunities for flashy display and for maudlin sentimentality, the playing had a mixture of sensitivity and professional objectivity that one can only admire. The character-piece style of Madeline Dring's mid-20oh-century, well-polished Italian Dance came across with cool-headed clarity.

Emmet Byrne and Rebecca Cap made a reliable and homogeneous partnership. Serious purpose was also shown in Cap's playing of the most demanding and wide-ranging of Schumann's Novelletten Op. 21 for solo piano. The eighth and last of this unusual set is a sort of round, astonishingly free in design and in the range of ideas. As with the other works on this programme, musicality was well-rounded, and earnestness was more evident than humour. Nevertheless, for reliable and enjoyable music-making, the whole recital left little to be desired.

Ulster Orchestra/Celso Antunes

Ulster Hall, Belfast

Dermot Gault

Bach - Cantata No 82, Ich habe genug

Brahms - Ein Deutsches Requiem

'A voluptuary with a wonderful ear," was G. B. Shaw's verdict on Brahms. "Voluptuous" isn't a word often attached to Brahms's German Requiem, but listening to the rich, deep sounds of divided violas and cellos in the opening bars, generously underpinned in this performance by the organ, one realises he had a point.

Celso Antunes conducted a flowing, passionate performance. The second movement, the movement which suffered most from the over-respectful approach fashionable until recently, was a bit businesslike, but in the sixth movement, the nearest the work gets to fast music, the steady tempo underlined the music's dramatic emphasis.

The real drama and meaning of the work should, of course, come from the choir. The Belfast Philharmonic Choir has recently been absent from some events where its participation would once have been expected as a matter of course.

It is currently in the process of appointing a new chorus master and this performance was specially prepared by Christopher Bell. It was clear that there is plenty for the new chorus master to do in matters of intonation and in developing the confidence of the sopranos and tenors above the stave, but there was also a surprisingly convincing basic sound in the first movement.

Sally Matthews was a rich, steady soprano, while Dean Robinson's light but eloquent baritone suited both the Brahms and the opening Bach solo cantata. The latter work's intimate scoring made it a bit small-scale for this venue but playing and singing were both agreeably stylish.