Reviews today include the Roscoe Quartet at Killruddery House, Bray, the IBO Chamber Soloists at Airfield House, Dundrum and Animals at Draíocht, Blanchardstown Town Centre, Dublin
Roscoe Quartet
Killruddery House, Bray
Andrew Johnstone
For three years now, viola player Graham Oppenheimer and cellist Nicholas Jones have been collaborating in occasional quartet partnerships with the busy and versatile pianist Martin Roscoe. They have recently been joined by a new violinist, Eyal Kless.
The group's debut concert in the Music in Great Irish Houses festival included Schumann's only quartet for piano and strings, and Alfred Schnittke's postmodernist fleshing-out of an unfinished movement by the young Mahler.
It also completed a survey they have been making of Brahms's trilogy of piano quartets. Though not released until the composer's maturity, his tortured third, in C minor, is mostly an early work. Its opening theme spells out the name of the woman who would drive him to perpetual bachelorhood, Schumann's widow Clara.
The glass-vaulted and marbled splendours of Killruddery House's orangery presented the players with a self-amplifying acoustic that seemed to aggravate tonal disparities between the piano and the three solo strings. With restricted vibrato and little prospect of dropping the dynamic, there was an aggressive hue to what ought to have been lighter and sweeter moments in Brahms's turbulent opening allegro. Particularly when the strings doubled one another in octaves, their intonations disagreed.
But the sense that Roscoe's colleagues were pitted against his adroit piano-playing became advantageous with the fingernail-on-blackboard glissandos and boxing-glove clusters of Schnittke's scherzo - a genuinely funny musical joke that lost nothing in the telling.
In a genial slow movement, Schumann's direction to custom-tune the cello's bottom string a tone lower than usual yielded some of the evening's loveliest and most delicate sonorities.
With quietly consistent tremolando chording, Roscoe created a safer, quasi-orchestral environment for the strings, and his deft passage work made for an adrenalin-laden finale.
IBO Chamber Soloists
Airfield House, Dundrum
Martin Adams
The Irish Baroque Orchestra (IBO) is one of the brightest stars in Ireland's concert life. It was not always so, and the recent founding of the IBO Chamber Soloists is both a deposit for the future and a mark of how far things have come in the orchestra's 10 years of existence.
The IBO's artistic director, Mark Duly, has aptly described the chamber soloists as the "engine" of the full orchestra. What he did not say was that thanks to the strong presence of the IBO's recently appointed musical director Monica Huggett, this engine has a supercharger. Apart from Huggett on the first violin, the chamber soloists are all Irish, with Claire Duff playing second and a continuo group of Sarah McMahon (cello), Richard Sweeney (theorbo) and Malcolm Proud (keyboard). It is no cliche to describe Huggett's position as the first among equals, for there are no passengers and no obvious disparities.
This programme of 17th-century works from Italy and Germany revealed fascinating contrasts of artistic character. In Marini's Sonata per due violini in quatro parte the violins were vivid personalities whose discourse had the flamboyance of dramatic speech.
Malcolm Proud played Pachelbel's Aria Sebaldina with a twinkle in the eye.
The combination of mechanical variation techniques and flamboyant figuration was given added piquancy by the sound of the chamber organ, and produced smiles all round.
Whether in a toccata by Piccinini for solo theorbo, in Rognoni's diminutions for violin and organ on Palestrina's madrigal Io son ferito, or in the astonishing virtuosity of a Biber Trio Sonata, there was no doubt that this music was designed to celebrate virtuosity before your eyes as well as your ears. These players celebrated with a vividness that no recording could match.
Animals
Draíocht, Blanchardstown Town Centre, Dublin
Sylvia Thompson
In this technological age, when even pre-schoolers are entranced by computer games, it is heartwarming to see how three to six-year-olds enthusiastically embraced the simple yet highly imaginative puppetry of the Spanish puppet theatre company, El Retablo Puppet Theatre. Right from the first appearance of the friendly doggy (glove puppet) playing with a bowler hat and ball, the audience was hooked.
And so they should have been, because puppeteer Pablo Vergne Quiroga is a maestro of his craft. In the 45-minute show, long-armed gloves with hats became snails, white fleecy cloths covered pink mittens to become sheep, and a green bag with limbs and bulgy eyes was a convincing frog.
A pink feather-duster hen clucked her way across the mini stage followed by two yellow balls as chickens. In a fascinating display of the animal behavioural phenomenon of imprinting, these chickens then quacked their way behind a duck, mooed after a cow and oinked after a pig. When they returned to the mother hen, they had a little bit of readjusting to do.
When Quiroga began to create animals from a long narrow piece of multi-jointed wood, the children shouted out the names of the animals - a giraffe, kangaroo, cow, horse, flamingo, fish, frog and butterfly - to the enthusiastic nods of the puppeteer. These stick-figure animals were perfect creations for the young audience.
Next, a long tube transformed itself into a caterpillar and, as if to further amuse his audience, Quiroga created letters from the tubing. The show ended when Quiroga cut out paper animals and lifted them on to a Noah's Ark. The children were given their own paper butterflies to bring home - taking away a little bit of magic from this beautiful, perfectly pitched show.
• Spréacha, Fingal's International Arts Festival for Children ended on Saturday.
