Reviews of the London Philharmonic Orchestra; the Mostly Modern Festival; the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra; Michael Buckley and Trivium.
Mutter, LPO/Masur, NCH, Dublin
Beethoven - Violin Concerto
Dvorak - Symphony No 8
There was exceptional promise in the combination of London Philharmonic Orchestra veteran maestro Kurt Masur and paragon of violinists Anne-Sophie Mutter. Expectations ran high.
Yet the reception for their eagerly-awaited Beethoven concerto was less than ecstatic - understandably so for the reading had found weaknesses in the score rather than strengths.
The first movement's sense of purpose was abandoned in favour of liberties with the tempo and obsessive foregrounding of solo detail. The more proper place for those indulgences, the slow movement, took them to extremes, repeatedly bringing the music to a halt. Spurts of momentum came as welcome relief in the finale, but by then there had been so many unauthorised hold-ups.
Why the torpidity? It was the last thing to be expected from Masur, yet once he left Mutter to her own devices in the cadenzas she became suddenly and spectacularly animated. These were brilliant but all-too-brief moments.
Elsewhere, the generous vibrato, the melting pianissimos and the needling acute notes that sound higher than they really are - those hallmarks of Mutter's playing were of little avail to the music.
Back at the rostrum after the interval, Masur was also back on form. Still sans baton, and now sans score, he effortlessly energised the orchestra.
Dvorak's melodies sprang to life in vivid colours, with diverse instruments meticulously blending into unified and novel sounds. Weight from the double basses brought depth, but not muddiness to the harmonies; extra-prompt attacks and releases gave a satisfying crunch to every tutti chord.
It all added up to a fresh and technically-splendid rendering of the composer's naive and loveable neo-classicism. Andrew Johnstone
Mostly Modern Festival, Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin
Artistic director Benjamin Dwyer developed the Italian theme of this year's Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern Festival with an insightful choice of instrumental pieces in contrasting contemporary styles.
Alluding to the syntax of romantic chamber music, Massimo Botter's Trio pitted efficient piano sonorities against chilly, disembodied string work. In Giacinto Scelsi's sinuous Kho-lo for flute and clarinet, the pervasive semitones and smaller intervals were more abstract yet tartly expressive.
Like raindrops gathering into a shower, dissipated staccatos steadily gathered into phrases in Franco Donatoni's Fili for flute and piano. With Aldo Clementi's serenata for clarinet, guitar, two violins and viola, scraps of melody and harmony sacrificed their self- contained logic to stubborn juxtaposition.
Dwyer's slick and hard-working ensemble VOX21 gave these varied pieces with unwavering advocacy. Yet they made heavy weather of Victor Lazzarini's percussive and randomly emphatic Dance of the Dawn, the winning entry in the festival's international composers' competition.
Taking the festival's prize for young Irish composers was Hugh Martin Boyle with December for violin and piano. Though the intended intonation was unclear, there was no doubting the effectiveness of its curious melodic glitches.
Two further Irish works included saxophone: John Buckley's Arabesque, a brisk solo sprint of non-jazzy virtuosity; and Dwyer's Tiento, an absorbing duo with piano that sticks rigidly by its own impressive strangeness.
With Raymond Deane's exotic Seachanges, the evening's programme ended. It had been a busy day for flautist Susan Doyle, violinist Leonie Curtin and saxophonist Kenneth Edge, each of whom had earlier played a sequenza by Luciano Berio.
They took these exacting, remorseless solos with due dash and determination. But it was accordianist Dermot Dunne who with sequenza XIII had most fully internalised Berio's ideas. Andrew Johnstone
Charlier, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov, NCH, Dublin
Rimsky-Korsakov - Tsar Saltan Suite (exc)
Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto
Lyadov - The Enchanted Lake Shostakovich - Symphony No 9
Ever since its first performance, in November 1945, Shostakovich's Symphony No 9 has been regarded as something of an enigma. Comments by the composer had aroused expectations for a massive hymn of praise celebrating victory in the second World War; and that was certainly what the Soviet authorities wanted. Instead they got a work that defies any obvious extra-musical meaning, that in its design, brevity and accessibility looks to the example of classical music in a way similar to Prokofiev's Classical Symphony of 1917, though not so directly.
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and its conductor emeritus, Alexander Anissimov, played this symphony straight, without any attempt to milk it for hidden seriousness or meaning.
This approach was justified by the consistent expressive clarity, including the light energy of the presto, a beautifully-cushioned, sprung rhythm in the moderato, and a hauntingly beautiful bassoon solo (Michael Jones) that set the atmosphere for the contemplative slow movement.
The smaller items on the programme, The Three Wonders from Rimsky-Korskov's Tsar Saltan Suite and Lyadov's The Enchanted Lake, received suitable attention to delicate colour and shaping. However, some of the most memorable aspects of this concert were associated with the performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Olivier Charlier's playing of the solo part had the sort of power and subtlety of tone that inspires total confidence. He is one of those musicians whose pianissimos filled the hall. The dance-like energy of the finale felt all the more appropriate for seeming to be effortless. Martin Adams
Michael Buckley, Mermaid Arts Centre
How refreshing, not just to be entertained, but to be challenged by a concert featuring traditional music. Jazz saxophonist Michael Buckley brought his commissioned Translations to the Mermaid, and proceeded to shift our understanding of just what music is - and reassured us that the creed stating what traditional music is now, and ever will be, world without end, doesn't have to be the only one followed by listeners or musicians.
As Buckley insisted prior to this performance, Translations is no "sean nós meets jazz". It was a vibrant, sometimes confusing, always bold exploration of the common ground that sits beneath them, and a celebration of their musical differences too.
Sean nós singer Éamon Ó Donnchadha approached the sextet of musicians as if they were a firing squad, and sang as if he were awaiting the pressure of a Kalashnikov against his temple. His is a voice that's an acquired taste, but his interpretation of An Bonnán Buí and Donnacha Bán might just have spawned a welter of converts.
Buckley's arrangements sought out remarkable whirlpools in which Greg Burk's languid piano, Aidan O'Donnell's double bass and Sean Carpio's drums basked. There Martin Nolan's pipes and Kevin O'Connor's fiddle caught the eddies, ducking and diving alongside the jazz lines with nervy agility. Buckley's own contributions were unnecessarily tentative, and the wedding of sax and pipes was particularly spectacular.
To these ears, the tunes worked more fluidly than the songs, but the experience was one of "more please". Siobhan Long
Trivium, Ambassador, Dublin
If US metal band Trivium didn't take what they do so seriously, you'd swear they were having a laugh at our expense. Everything about them smacks of cliché - from the rash of tattoos, the studded bracelets and the Flying V-neck guitars to the raised podia on each side of the to-die-for drum kit, the strobe lighting, and stacks of Marshall amps on each side of the stage.
Queen's We Will Rock You introduces the band - again, it's another cheap, almost camp shot, but from the time when Freddie Mercury's vocals fade away to the end of the show it's the last instance of coherence.
What follows is a modern metal blueprint, the "circle jerk" effect wherein each song is throttled to within an inch of its life in order to get to the end in record time. As such, the gig starts out relatively interesting; you wonder will the band allow themselves to be restrained by the blueprint, or will they fly off at different tangents and create something that prevents you from snubbing them.
Alas, Trivium merely go with the flow. You want squalling guitar solos that start on solid ground but end up in a home for the sonically bewildered? You ache for vocals that sound like King Kong mixing it with the collective snarl of a thousand irritated wolfhounds? You want legs akimbo on the monitors, triumphalist " devil horn" signs at regular intervals, drum solos, and thoroughly insincere "we're so glad to be in Dublin" speeches from the stage? All these and more constitute the Trivium experience, which, it has to be noted, was lapped up by the audience, most of whom were perhaps too young to realise they were being sold a musical pup that borrowed left, right and centre from metal's legacy without adding an iota of anything new. Depressing? No, just embarrassing and mediocre. Tony Clayton-Lea
Mostly Modern Festival, Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin
It was a brave and welcome move for the Mostly Modern Festival to showcase the music of Italian composer Aldo Clementi, who turned 80 last May. Like Steve Reich, featured composer of last month's RTÉ Living Music Festival, Clementi makes insistent use of canons, and, like Reich, he's fond of repeating his material. But there's not the slightest risk of anyone confusing the two men's musics.
Emilio Carapezza, who gave Saturday afternoon's talk on Clementi's music, likened the patterning of the music at one point to the patterning of a drawing by MC Escher, in which a single image, reflected and inverted in orientation and shading filled the whole picture.
But Escher's work, however paradoxical, remains lucid at the surface. Clementi's, by comparison, seems to be constituted of dark matter, even though much of his material is of familiar cast, even as well-known as Happy Birthday to You, which he used for a Tribute, written for Elliott Carter on his 80th birthday. Think of those T-shirts compacted into small square bricks and you'll have an idea of the outcome of the processes Clementi subjects his material to.
It's not unusual for Clementi's pieces to dwell in a kind of steady state that slowly loses drive, like the winding down of a mechanism that's unable to sustain its momentum. Carapezza painted the composer as a man for whom "construction is a goal, not a means to present discourse more effectively".
Carapezza's talk, unfortunately, included no sound examples, only diagrams and examples from the scores. And the VOX21's evening performances of seven works were largely unsatisfactory, even shaky, and with little sense of either musical or technical confidence. The major exception was Márta Erdei's bullishly brutal performance of the Thelonius Monk-inspired Blues for solo piano.
The highlights in the day's other events included Clementi's Studio per una passacaglia of 1993, evoking a sound world of 1960s outer space music from movies , and two works from a lunchtime concert by William Dowdall (flute) and John Feeley (guitar). Elliott Carter's Petrarch-inspired Il scrivo vento for solo flute set itself apart from the rest of the programme for its straightforward mastery of gesture, and David Fennessy's duo, Continuity Error, intriguingly juxtaposed its blocks of material.
The festival's standards of presentation are in urgent need of improvement. There are no programme notes nor dates for the compositions themselves. And some of the biographical notes on local performers were a lot more detailed than the printed information on Clementi himself. Go figure! Michael Dervan
