Michael Dervan reviews the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition Finals in the NCH, Dublin, The performance of Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone), Catrin Finch (harp), and the RTÉCO / Gareth Jones at The Helix is reviewed by John Allen while Bo Diddley and Chubby Checker's gig at the Letterkenny Rock 'N' Roll Weekend is reviewed by Mary Phelan
AXA Dublin International Piano Competition Finals
NCH, Dublin
The finals are traditionally the most public and the most controversial stage of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition. The contestants play concertos to full houses at the National Concert Hall, and the performances are relayed live on radio and television, with all the extra burdens and intrusions that such exposure brings in its train.
The finals are also, it must be said, the competition's most stressful stage for other reasons, too. The stakes are now higher for the young competitors. The winning post is, so to speak, within sight. And yet, to reach that post, they have to give the type of performance for which they are least well prepared. Solo recital work, the meat of the previous rounds, is far easier to come by than concerto work with a full orchestra, which is the test of the finals. So, paradoxically, as the stakes rise, the standards often fall.
The controversy arises from one of two main sources -- outright and absolute perplexity at the jury's final choice of winner (as was the case with Max Levinson in 1997), or the fine shading of choice between neck-and-neck contenders (as happened in 1991 between Pavel Nersessian and Enrico Pace in 1991). There was even controversy at the first competition back in 1988, when Krzysztof Jablonski, who clearly outplayed Philippe Cassard in the finals, yielded to Cassard, who in the jury's estimation, had performed more strongly in the competition as a whole.
Two of this year's finalists weakened so much in the finals that they immediately put themselves out of contention for the top prize. Heidi Hau (27, US) showed neither the technical mastery nor imaginative fluidity that are needed for Chopin's F minor Concerto. And Andrey Ponochevny (26, Belarus) took a strangely laboured approach to Rachmaninov's Second Concerto. He scored serious own-goals by failing to understand when his was a secondary role, and he also frequently found himself out of step with the orchestra. The strong projection of his opening round was nowhere recognisable in his concerto performance.
Two players reached back to the Viennese classics, an area that most contestants steer well clear of in the finals. Brenda Jones (24, US) chose Beethoven's Second Concerto and played it with care and restraint.
Matan Porat (21, Israel) played Mozart's Concerto in C, K467, with the same commonsensical reserve he had shown in a Mozart sonata in the semi-finals. He didn't seem quite as expressively alert in the concerto, however, though he offered a unique experience in the exotic, chromatic excursions of a cadenza of his own composition.
The player who won the hearts of the NCH audience on the opening night of the finals was Li Wang (29, Canada). In the earlier rounds, his propensity to let himself go resulted in some performances of questionable taste. In Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, everything came together for him, and he integrated effortlessly with the orchestra. His open-heartedness and fearlessness in the face of technical challenges helped him peak at just the right moment in competitive terms.
Antti Siirala (23, Finland) emerged early as the clear favourite to win the competition, and kept to his high standard in a judiciously-paced performance of Brahms's First Concerto. This is a young man's work (begun by Brahms at the age of 21 and completed at the age of 26) and sometimes provokes exaggerated rhetoric in performance. Siirala showed himself as fully responsive to its introspectiveness as to its passionate moments of storm and struggle, and his playing combined natural fluidity and richness of expressive detailing in a way none of his rivals managed to match.
Like the other finalists, he was probably hindered slightly by the unusual acoustic dryness of the hall, an effect of the gauze TV decorations and black floor covering on the stage; and there was a distinctly audible hiss (the cooling fans of some TV lights, it seemed) which competed with some of his quietest playing. The members of the NSO under Gerhard Markson coped admirably with the extraordinary range of challenges (some of them quite extreme) which the six performers presented to them.
The jury made a popular decision by awarding the first prize to Siirala, and for the first time ever, reached that decision unanimously; Siirala also took the Bridget Doolan/Mozart Prize. The other finalists were ranked in the reverse of the order in which I've discussed them. The Charles J. Brennan prize for the best-placed Irish player went to Cathal Breslin, who also took the prize for the best performance of a nocturne by John Field. The AXA Recital Prize and the Schubert Prize went to Matan Porat. Li Wang took the NSO Concerto Prize. The Prokofiev Prize went to Juho Pohjonen (who was eliminated in the semi-finals), and the Lyric FM Prize for the best performance of one of the commissioned pieces went to Heidi Hau.
Michael Dervan
Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone), Catrin Finch (harp), RTÉCO / Gareth Jones
The Helix
This event was advertised as a Bryn Terfel concert; but the singer's participation amounted to only half of the programme. Like Lesley Garret at the same venue, the night before, the charismatic Welshman spoke a lot and quickly established an amicable bond with his audience. And he did it, moreover, without recourse to any microphone.
Terfel is one of the world's finest operatic bass-baritones, but he limited his offerings from that genre to four items. After a blustery and untidy opening with Bizet's Toreador song, he affirmed his high reputation as a Mozart singer with impeccable performances of Papageno's entrance aria, enhanced by his own pan-piping, and Figaro's Non più andrai. He topped both of these with a nuance-rich rendition of Falstaff's honour speech in which he vocally and dramatically assumed the persona of Verdi's Shakespearean fat man.
In these arias, as elsewhere, the singer's articulation of text was exemplary. But the good diction came at the expense of line, something particularly noticeable in declamatory rather than smooth versions of slow songs by Tchaikovsky and Brahms. It was also present, along with an amount of affectedness, in some of the second half's lighter offerings. His best efforts in this part of the evening were a couple of cleanly delivered Welsh songs, the second of them in Gaelic and accompanied by harpist Catrin Finch.
In her own right, Finch provided the evening's most interesting contributions with accomplished playing of Debussy's Dances Sacred and Profane and solo pieces by Albéniz and William Hopkin. The concert was conducted by Gareth Jones, who had a strong rapport with both singer and harpist, and who directed the RTÉCO in exciting, and disciplined, accounts of Verdi's Force of Destiny overture and Richard Rodgers' Carousel waltz.
John Allen
Bo Diddley and Chubby Checker
Letterkenny Rock 'N' Roll Weekend
A standing ovation at the end of a gig is a tribute to any artist, but getting one right at the beginning, before you have strummed a chord or sung a note, really is quite something.
That was the reception that greeted Bo Diddley at the first of his three appearances in Letterkenny at the weekend. Certainly, the 74-year-old can rock 'n' roll, and has lost none of his edge, playing nonstop for a full two hours.
Having iconic status as one of its founding fathers, Bo Diddley shared the headline billing with Chubby Checker, also playing his only engagement outside the US this year, at the inaugural Letterkenny Rock 'N' Roll weekend.
Within minutes, Diddley had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. Ranging in age from nine to 90, but with a large cohort of young guitar aficionados, many had travelled far to be there, and revelled in the intimacy of the setting and their physical proximity to the maestro, as he belted out old favourites such as Hey Bo Diddley, I'm a Man, and Who Do You Love?
Interestingly, both band leader/bass player and keyboards/maracas player were women - Debbie Hastings and Margo Lewis- something rare and welcome among rockers of this era. Both have venerable musical credentials, Lewis's stretching right back to the 1960s, when she was a member of Goldie and the Gingerbreads, one of the first all-female rock bands. Underpinning the characteristic "Bo Diddley Beat" was excellent drummer Yoshitaka Shimada from Japan. Diddley, however, was always centre-stage, his guitar synthesiser, contagious good humour and distinctive voice the pivotal force. Despite his much proclaimed disapproval of the "dirty lyrics" of modern rap, he proved no mean rapper himself.
Chubby Checker's audience was somewhat less disparate in age, but equally enthusiastic. Checker certainly knows how to work the crowd, although his style smacked somewhat of Los Vegas. Poured into his blue jeans, without a grey hair to be seen in the impressive mop atop his still boyish face, he strutted his stuff like there was no tomorrow, and the audience just loved it. Rollicking through a medley of originals and cover versions from The Hucklebuck to The Twist, Shake Rattle and Roll to Good Golly, Miss Molly, his voice is as good as ever.
With extremely tight backing provided by The Wildcats, including some wonderful saxophone playing by Roy King, the audience just couldn't stay seated. Aided, abetted and cajoled by Checker, several joined him on stage to do their thing. This included a group of at least 10 men, most of them well past the first flush of youth, each of whom gave a solo hip wiggling performance before leaving the stage. Not something one witnesses very often on a rainy Sunday night in Donegal, but such was the heady mix of music, nostalgia and euphoria.
Mary Phelan
