Gerry Colgan reviews The Unexpected Man at the Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, the performance of Helen Huang and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra at the National Concert Hall in Dublin is reviewed by Michael Dervan and Siobhán Long reviews Pierre Bensusan in the Helix, Dublin
The Unexpected Man Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire
Yasmina Reza's play, an 80-minute two- hander, is so evanescent as to be virtually invisible. A man and a woman share a compartment on a train travelling from Paris to Frankfurt. He is a successful author and she is an avid fan of his work.
How will they get on; what will they talk about? For most of the play, they don't. They speak in interior monologues giving information about their personalities and lives. He is bitter, about his work, insomnia, bowel movements and sex. His daughter is about to marry an older man, friends are no longer the supports they were, the well of his creativity is running dry.
She is more balanced but has had her traumas and a great friend has recently died. Her children have grown upand she is essentially solitary, bereft of intellectual and sexual companionship. But a major prop has always been the work of the man sitting opposite her, whom she recognises; she has his latest novel in her handbag.
He finally speaks to her, but only to ask if a window might be opened. She then takes an initiative by reading the book openly, and he takes the bait without revealing his identity. Do you like it, he asks, and revels in her answers. But he goes on, driven by his bitterness, to pillory the author, and she responds by abandoning pretence and telling him what his books have meant to her. It ends there, with both on a psychological high.
Emmet Bergin and Anita Reeves are authoritative as the strangers-soulmates. He makes a convincing writer and she is intelligent and attractive. They make the most of a text that is more akin to a short story than to a play, cerebral rather than emotional. It is not easy to engage closely with, but the quality of the acting is redemptive. Caroline FitzGerald directs it with the right rhythms, in an excellent set design by Kathy Strachan. Gerry Colgan
Runs to March 15; booking at 01-2312929
Helen Huang, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra National Concert Hall, Dublin
Turandot Suite - Busoni. Piano Concerto In D Minor K466 - Mozart. Dragon Wings No 4 - Chen Guo Ping. Symphony No 6 - Dvorak
Since 2000 the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, which turned professional in 1974, has had Hong Kong-born, US-trained Samuel Wong as its music director.
In its Dublin debut under Wong on Saturday the orchestra made a strong impression in the orientalism of excerpts from Busoni's Turandot Suite.In three movements from it, Wong conveyed the music's exotic atmosphere with pointed character and brightly clashing colours.
His handling of Mozart's Piano Concerto In D Minor was more reined-in, as if he were at pains to counteract the temptations to romantic overindulgence the piece offers.
The soloist, Helen Huang, showed a keen understanding of the challenges placed in the performer's path by Mozart.
Her fingerwork was fluent but not mechanical. She can curve her phrasing and tilt it lightly so the tension rises and falls in long sequences of passage work, and the balances of her voicing are those of a mature and experienced ear. She may not have carried the spare lines of the slow movement with as much success as the busier writing of the outer movements. But, on the evidence of this performance, she must rank among the most subtly expressive Mozart players of her generation.
Sadly, the concert went downhill after the interval. Chen Guo Ping's Dragon Wings No 4, for the orchestra's principal percussionist, Lung Heung-Wing, and his 12-year-old son, Mark, is a trashy concoction that wouldn't be out of place in a circus. The duo played it to perfection, but the visual theatre it offered was altogether more entertaining than its musical content.
Wong's approach to Dvorak's Sixth Symphony was inexplicably stiff, and the performance showed the limitations of the Hong Kong players as clearly as the Busoni had revealed their strengths. Michael Dervan
Pierre Bensusan Helix, Dublin
For those of us who have extreme difficulty patting our heads and rubbing our bellies at the same time, listening to Pierre Bensusan is an exercise in awe.Armed only with an acoustic guitar, he somehow conjures an orchestral spectrum of sound.
Bensusan's strength has always been his indifference to fads. While others might have chased around every twist and turn of contemporary music's picaresque pathway, he has remained immune to every lemming-like rush he has witnessed. Bensusan's comfort zone is firmly rooted in the French Algerian music of his homeland, although he infuses it with healthy tinctures of jazz, blues and Eastern and Latin rhythms along the way.
The pristine acoustics and unhurried atmosphere of the Helix melded with his repertoire as though they were long-lost siblings ecstatic at finding one another. Drawing from his latest album, Intuite, and his back catalogue, Bensusan reinvented tunes we thought we knew inside out.
Joined by bassist Emmanuel Binet for the second half of the night, Bensusan hit full throttle with a swathe of gloriously dysrhythmic pieces, including Cordillière and Le Bateau Fiction. Binet's double bass was transmuted into tabla, bongo and even kettle drum at times, courtesy of his superb ability to coax cadences from the darkest corners of the music into the light.
A new piece, Ballade In A, was ample reassurance that the imaginative well has much left in it, and Les Voiles Catalanes pushed both Bensusan and Binet to marry instruments seamlessly. Bensusan's decision to open up the sounds to cajoling bass lines was a wise one: with a set of more than two and a half hours, he managed to lift and lighten the repertoire with Binet's support. Not that the numerous guitarists present would have minded had he not. Every note and gesture was dissected with surgical precision, the better to relive them long after we'd vacated the darkness of the Helix. Siobhán Long
