A selection of reviews, including the Bobo Stension Trio at Crawdaddy, the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir/RTÉ NSO/Altschuler at the National Concert Hall and Lifeboat at the Ark
Bobo Stenson Trio, Crawdaddy
Ray Comiskey
Presented by The Improvised Music Company, last Friday's concert marked over three years since the great Swedish pianist, Bobo Stenson, with Anders Jormin (bass) and Jon Falt (drums) debuted his then new trio here.
With such longevity, it's a given that the trio's musical dialogue functions at such a high level. They delivered on expectations, opening with Jormin's rubato Seli, shifting into medium slow for the piano solo which brought it to a dramatic conclusion. That was succeeded by a graceful waltz though Astor Piazzola's Chiquilín de Bachín, with superb piano and bass solos and an amazing sense of trio interaction, which continued through a free performance that followed.
The Latin El Major, with excellent interplay between bass and piano, and a delightful extended coda, offered contrast, while the set got a gripping climax with Charles Ives's Serenity, on which Jormin's ability to extract haunting quarter tones from his bowed bass was wonderfully atmospheric; Stenson's solo became a segue into an exhilarating There Comes A Time, where Falt's superbly polyrhythmic drumming recalled the piece's composer, the late Tony Williams.
That was a prime example of the trio's clarity of focus regardless of the complexity of their interaction. And, as with all the other performances, there was a satisfying sense of wholeness about the organic way they developed each one.
Throughout a disappointingly brief second set, although it opened with a piece, Allegretto Rubato, which seemed more like an interesting game than anything else, that sense of wholeness persisted. The trio delved back in time for their exploration of Purcell's Music For a While, which provoked a soaringly melodic piano solo, and took on Ornette Coleman's Ray's Face, whose harmonic stasis gave them considerable freedom to groove. Then, for an encore, Stenson led the trio into a wonderfully oblique tour of Gordon Jenkins's Goodbye, with even the reprise and an extended coda full of lovely surprises. It was a glimpse that this outstanding group was beginning to really hit its creative stride.
RTÉ Philharmonic Choir/RTÉ NSO/Altschuler,
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Prokofiev - Lieutenant Kijé Suite.
Mozart - Piano Concerto in A K488. Shostakovich - Symphony No 13 (Babi Yar).
Prokofiev compiled his Lieutenant Kijé Suite from the score of a 1934 film about the career of a non-existent army officer, whose file was maintained to hide a bureaucratic error.
The music has a sweetly tuneful surface laced with satiric intent.
Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, which includes a setting of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Babi Yar, is a symphony written in a musical style that was unimpeachably "correct" by the Soviet standards of the early 1960s. Yet the message it carried made the establishment nervous enough for stumbling blocks to be laid in the way of its early performances.
Friday's performance of the two works showed the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Altschuler to be more comfortable with the darkness of the Shostakovich than the light and sometimes frisky manner of the Prokofiev. The Lieutenant Kijé music sounded non-committal rather than spirited. The Shostakovich was more thoroughly engaged and engaging.
It would have been difficult for anyone in the hall, either on stage or in the audience, to be indifferent to the contributions of Nikita Storojev, the bass soloist in the symphony. Storojev is a big man with a big voice and a big heart. He gave himself to Yevtushenko's words and Shostakovich's music as if his life depended on it, and the basses of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir fully entered into the spirit too.
Shostakovich had originally planned a standalone setting of Yevtushenko's brave highlighting of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. He later selected other poems to extend the work into a symphony, and Yevtushenko wrote the text of the fourth movement, Fear, specially for Shostakovich. It opens with the highly evocative, vulnerable sound of a soft tuba solo, and concludes with the resonant lines "I am haunted by the fear/of not writing with all my might".
Between the two Russian works Cathal Breslin despatched Mozart's Piano Concerto in A, K488, with clinical efficiency. His expressive reach, however, was rather limited, and he seemed most fully at home in his modern-sounding first movement cadenza, where he could freely display many aspects of his technique which were otherwise uncalled-for in this work.
Dublin Theatre Festival
Lifeboat,
The Ark
Gerry Colgan
Catherine Wheels is the name of a Scottish company that specialises in plays for young audiences, and it won a major award in 2002 for Lifeboat, by Nicola McCartney.
Its strength lies in the fact that it is based on a true story, and in the performances of the two young women who enact it.
We meet the 15-year-old girls, one in London and the other in Liverpool, just before the start of the second World War, and get the flavour of their times and homes from popular songs and snippets of family relationships. As hostilities heat up, a decision is taken to evacuate children to Canada, and the two meet on a large ship as they leave England. They become friends, sharing a spirit of adventure.
Reality comes crashing through their fantasies when the ship is torpedoed, and they are left holding on to an overturned lifeboat.
This is animated storytelling, seeking to put on stage a credible version of real events.
