Maria McKee at Crawdaddy and the RTE NSO are reviewed
Maria McKee at Crawdaddy, Dublin
Misery, it seems, isn't always fond of company. In her first solo tour for 20 years, Maria McKee represents just one strand of her career - woe-betide Americana - but with the unpredictable McKee, you have to start somewhere.
There are many versions of the LA songstress: frontwoman of roots rockers Lone Justice; Fergal Sharkey's unlikely hitmaker; syrupy siren of Show Me Heaven (a song with which she no longer seems to be on speaking terms); and now, the musician reconciled with roots rock on her recent album, Peddlin' Dreams.
McKee, smothered in black from her inky curls to the dark ruffles of a frontier dress, set the theme of her show straight away: American Gothic.
McKee began with This World is Not My Home, a traditional, ghostly moan. Shuffling in the delicate, acoustic cynicism of Peddlin' Dreams and manic exhortations of Absolutely Baby Stars, McKee may have claimed to miss her band, but her voice is an instrument to fill any space.
At times it skipped crazily along the octaves, as airy and distracted as McKee's stage persona. On Breathe, for instance, her singing seemed tethered to earthly concerns while leaping routinely into high fantasy.
How much of McKee's apparent capriciousness is an act is hard to say; her between-songs Katharine Hepburn impersonations, random observations and wicked one-liners ("It's not a bustle," she told us, drifting to her keyboard, "it's my ass") were at odds with the perfect ache of her lyrics.
A ditty hijacked from Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls made similar detours from pathos, but, alone at her keyboard, McKee accentuated the sombre undercurrent of Neil Young's Barstool Blues. She did the same with A Good Heart and a final, reassuring Life Is Sweet.
McKee kept love, abandon and heaven out of reach. Sometimes, she proved, misery can sound just as rapturous. Peter Crawley
RTÉ NSO/Maloney at the NCH, Dublin
Meticulously prepared and directed by Gavin Maloney, the music in this week's Horizons concert was selected by leading electro-acoustic composer Roger Doyle. Having devoted more than 30 years to studio work, Doyle has now become something of a stranger to the concert platform. But he had no qualms about reviving some of the purely instrumental music of his student days, juxtaposing it with works by Thea Musgrave and Raymond Deane.
Each in its own way, the first three items occasionally lapsed into tonal harmonies. With Musgrave's Memento Vitae: Concerto in Homage to Beethoven, this was due to some direct quotation from the master himself. With Doyle's early Four Sketches for Orchestra, it evinced a youthful uncertainty of style, while with Deane's Embers it had the effect of rhetoric used out of context.
Musgrave, however, judiciously overlays Beethoven's melodies and harmonies with clustered strings, jagged winds and pounding percussion. Her resistance to classical form, phraseology and expression is absolute.
Deane grabs attention by placing insistent silences between his forlorn snatches for strings and solo violin. The hiatuses seem dilatory at first, but their effect is cumulative and, in the end, winning.
Doyle's latest work in the programme was a three-minute extract from his chiefly electronic 1987 radio piece, These Unsolved Mysteries. The considerable trouble he took over the orchestration has its rewards in a dynamic score that's crowded but never cluttered, and leaves you wanting more.
But his All The Rage, from 1974, made the strongest impression by far. It begins with a cadenza for balloons. Squeaked, stroked, let loose and finally burst, they're succeeded by screeching violins, flatulent trombones, players applauding themselves, and creaky strains of Amhrán na bhFiann. It's comic, barbarous and satirical, and it's thoroughly entertaining. Andrew Johnstone
