The NoisettesVicar St, Dublin
The Noisettes must be sponsored by the sequin and high-heeled shoe industries, because their crowd seems to be keeping both sectors afloat. When the band takes to the stage, the Saturday night revellers roar their approval. Most acts would kill for this atmosphere, and Shingai Shoniwa does her best to provoke it further, flirting with the crowd and delegating bass duties early in the set so she can drape herself backwards across the bass drum.
This is a band who clearly love the spotlight and the act of making music, and they have difficulty settling on a specific sound, dexterously hopping from genre to genre. There is the faux-town soul and stripped down 12-bar bluesy intro to Never Forget You, the full on shimmer and shake of the disco Don't Upset the Rhythm (Go Baby Go), the indie Brit swagger of Wild Young Hearts, and one track that doesn't so much tip its hat to AC/DC as stop them in the street and enquire after the health of their families. The effect is impressive, but live it can occasionally feel a touch derivative.
Throughout, Shoniwa's outstanding vocals are given priority and drenched in perhaps a little too much reverb, but the ability of the musicians isn't in doubt. Dan Smith's guitar riffs are whip tight and Jamie Morrison's rock beats and thrumming fills buttress the more poppy numbers with a steely, dynamic spine. Choosing to cover the Killers' When You Were Youngmight be odd, but they give it a shuffley, alt.country feel (another genre off the list) that uncovers a little sweetness.
There is no doubt the crowd is in the palm of Shoniwa's hand, and the Noisettes are getting all the attention on their sumptuous gold and silver stage. It is the final, rocked-out, glammed-up version of T. Rex's Children of the Revolutionthat most of the glittering crowd will carry away with them. The singer wanders down into the audience and climbs on to someone's shoulders for a grand finale, just a track after descending from the roof on an illuminated ladder.
A suitable ending to the showtunes and showbiz at the biggest party in town.
Wispelwey/ RTÉ NSO/ Dworzynski
NCH, Dublin
Borodin– In the Steppes of Central Asia
Shostakovich– Cello Concerto No 1
Tchaikovsky– Symphony No 1 (Winter Daydreams)
This was the first instalment in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s season-long chronological survey of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies.
Three of the programmes will be all-Russian affairs – Shostakovich’s concertos providing companion pieces – but four Irish composers will feature too, through new pieces by Siobhán Cleary, David Fennessy and Jennifer Walshe, plus the late Aloys Fleischmann’s Introduction and Funeral March.
The survey got off to a good start under Polish conductor Michal Dworzynski, who first came to attention in Ireland in the closing concert of the 2001 Dublin Master Classes International Orchestral Conducting Course, a concert which also featured another bright star, Gavin Maloney. Dworzynski went on to win the Donatella Flick conducting competition in 2006, become assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Beethoven Academy Orchestra in Cracow.
Tchaikovsky's First Symphony ( Winter Daydreams) dates from 1866, when the composer was 26. It's the kind of work you could heap with praise as a masterly first essay in symphonic form by a composer from a country with no symphonic tradition. Or, on the other hand, you could point to its obvious shortcomings, such as Tchaikovsky's habit of saying so much of what he says more than once before moving on.
Audiences seem to see it both ways, and like hearing the piece, but not too often. Dworzynski made a strong case for it, glorying in its gorgeous tunes, delighting in its grand build-ups as well as in the delicate scoring of the Scherzo, and allowing full expression to the many intimations of the mature Tchaikovsky.
He also secured an atmospheric performance of Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia, a piece of evocative orchestral wizardry in which not very much happens the way not very much happens in Ravel's Bolero.
The evening’s highlight, however, was the performance of the cello concerto Shostakovich wrote for Rostropovich in 1959, and which the great cellist memorised in just three days in order to give a private performance for the composer.
Pieter Wispelwey is a player with a tone that’s both strong and honeyed, and he took the black, manic intensity of the opening movement in his stride, Dworyznski providing an accompaniment that was uncompromising in its bite.
The calm desolation of the slow movement was equally finely caught, and there was a rivetting intensity in the extended cadenza and the boisterously twisted finale, which sends up a favourite song of Stalin's (though it buries it so well that even Rostropovich didn't spot it straight away). MICHAEL DERVAN
