Irish Times writers review Charley Pride at the National Concert Hall, Concorde at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Slayer at the Point Theatre and the RTE Vanburgh String Quartet at the National Gallery.
Charley Pride
National Concert Hall
Karen Karroll (yes, really) is, she blithely declares, "new to the market", and sure enough, she bears the obvious imprint of a marketing department - but shows few signs of any close encounters with a creative consultant. She is, she also confides, "thrilled to be supporting Charlie Pride", and her snappy jaunt through Country Roads and Baby Blue (an oldie beloved of the Conquerors), propelled by her foghorn delivery bludgeoned us into almost believing her.
Dion Pride, son of Charley, eased an angsty audience through a short warm-up set that hinted at the talents of the father, but not much else. After workmanlike renditions of Rhinestone Cowboy (with every last note a carbon copy of Glen Campbell's original), and Rose Coloured Glasses, Pride Junior wisely exited stage left just as the punters were beginning to wonder where the main man was lurking.
With 12 dates on his Irish tour, Charley Pride still has a truckload of fans hanging on his word. He launches headlong into a muscular rendition of Every Heart Should Have One and after the opening three minutes, it was clear why this 68-year-old is still playing to (almost) full houses. His vocal range may be slightly curtailed, but the performer in him is every bit as hungry for an audience as he was when he released his debut in 1966.
Amid shameless on-stage plugs for his latest CDs and apple-pie autobiography, Pride carved a well-calculated route through past glories, from the throwaway folksiness of Crystal Chandelier to the cringe-worthy High On The Mountain Of Love, his band endorsing every rhythm and note with the rapt attention of a sextet on autopilot.
From there, Pride sailed through a soporific He'll Have To Go, tackled a saccharine duet with Dion on Tennessee Girl and massacred a medley of fine gospel songs from I'll Fly Away to May The Circle Be Unbroken. This was unapologetically "old" country: colour by numbers, predictable and utterly relished by Pride's faithful devotees, but hardly enough to lure any newcomers to his fold.- Siobhán Long
Concorde
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
James Wilson - Sonatina. Fumiko Miyachi - Autumn Wind Song. Thoma Simaku - Reflexions de la Croix I. Elaine Agnew - In the Adriatic.
Three of the four composers featured in Concorde's 30th anniversary concert were on hand to introduce their pieces. Only James Wilson, who died last year aged 82, had to let his music speak for itself.
Nor was this the only way that he was the odd one out. Unlike the prevailingly thoughtful, rather serious character of the rest of the programme, his Sonatina for clarinet, violin, cello and accordion is cheeky and good-humoured and full of obvious affection for Stravinsky.
The slow third movement provides a short break from all the wit and energy, opening with an elegiac solo for cello. Wilson subtitled the movement Homage to Orlando Gibbons and charmingly described it as "a rather belated result of harpsichord studies undertaken half a century earlier". The Sonatina, commissioned by Concorde in 1998, was given in memoriam.
Fumiko Miyachi's Autumn Wind Song - written for Concorde founder Jane O'Leary's 50th birthday and here receiving its premiere - forlornly traces a chilly yet colourful transition from summer to winter. While it was a pity no translation was provided of Toson Shimazaki's poem, in fact soprano Tine Verbecke was hard to hear anyway from her position behind the players.
Thoma Simaku's 2003 Reflexions de la Croix I is a slow-boiler, dark and sustained, sober and unsafe. Via multiple combinations of alto flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, Simaku reflects on his childhood in the 1950s-1960s, a time when crosses were banned in his native Albania. He uses each new colour he creates sparingly, like a woman wearing just the right amount of perfume.
Antrim-born Elaine Agnew treads warily amidst the raw emotions of American Chris Agee's In the Adriatic, poems composed following the death of his young daughter Miriam in 2001. Whether or not Agnew actually adds anything to the cruel reality of Agee's blunt, grieving lines, her settings for soprano, clarinets, accordion and cello find voices which complement and empathise with the poet's various different angles and vignettes. The result, which was receiving its premiere, is as sad a piece of art as you'll ever encounter. - Michael Dungan
Slayer
The Point, Dublin
Heavy metal thunder? Check. Showers of dandruff? Check. Lightning bolts out of the blue? Not exactly - this metal event (going under the umbrella title of the Unholy Alliance) was a depressingly predictable, aggressive display of tattoos, tailor-made rebellion and bare-chested, beer-stained Fight Club slam dancing. The bill included second rate metal acts such as Thine Eyes Bleed, Lamb of God, Children of Bodom and In Flames, each of which showed disturbing if inevitable signs of metal fatigue: the same old riffs and poses, same old dependency on notions of tribal allegiance, same old torturing of vocal chords and mangling of guitar solos.
Slayer, one of the most established metal acts of the past 25 years, were by contrast the epitome of streamlined professionalism. The Los Angeles thrash band were once in line to take on Metallica for the "Kings of Metal" crown but decided at the crunch point to plough their very own non-commercial furrow.
The band landed on stage to the sound of baying fans, a backdrop of a crucified Jesus, and a chorus of the standard rock'n'roll query of "are you ready?" From there on in it was a strangulated caterwaul of relentless riffs and intense, mind-numbing banality. We'd love to be able to tell you that the lyrics were a shrewd exercise in right-wingish intellectual rigour and political comment, but the indecipherable guttural howls from singer Tom Araya made such analysis impossible.
Not everyone sees it that way, of course; you can safely presume that the shuddering, breakneck-speed music is a crucial part of the lives of most people in the audience. The link between the music, the psychology and the philosophy of it impacts heavily, even on the resolutely middle-class kids that make up a sizeable portion of the crowd - the same kids who will be driven home in their waiting parents' cars.
Slayer and their ilk tap into this natural paradox; it's hardly their fault, but their outsider music - administered in small, strategic doses lest the shock to the system be too much for the little darlings to bear - comes close to being as comfortably numb an experience as it's possible to get. - Tony Clayton-Lea
RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet
National Gallery, Dublin
Haydn - Quartet in C Op 74 No 1. Mozart - Quartet in D K575. Borodin - Quartet No 2
This concert might nearly have been billed something like "the RTÉ Vanbrugh Cello (plus additional strings)". Of the three quartets in the programme, two give exceptional prominence to the cello.
The cello spotlight in Mozart's K575 was designed to appeal to its intended dedicatee, King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, a keen cellist whom the composer met while desperately seeking commissions to shore up his disastrous finances. It was to have been the first of a set of six quartets for the king. Sadly, Mozart completed only three which he sold for a pittance without dedication - royal or otherwise - in 1790.
They were the last he wrote and weren't published until a year later, by which time Mozart was dead.
There is a similarly loaded cello part in Borodin's Quartet No 2. This time, however, the extra-musical content is all positive. Borodin composed it in 1881 as a gift for his wife and as a reminiscence of their early days together 20 years previously.
The second movement scherzo is an almost ecstatic waltz and the finale releases an amount of pent-up pace and energy.
But it's the slower first and third movements which contain the loving and emotional core of the work, both based on luscious romantic melodies which are carried primarily by the cello.
Vanbrugh cellist Christopher Marwood was in fine form for his day in the sun. Music like the Borodin dares the performer to go full throttle, to inhabit the indulgent expressive world in which it was born and then not water the music down. Marwood took up the challenge and played with heart on sleeve, making it a very authentic performance.
Mozart, on the other hand, is subtler than Borodin, and Marwood adjusted his playing to measure. Throughout, the rest of the Vanbrugh were suitable partners, coming together more as equals in Haydn's jolly Op 74 No 1, an altogether more democratic and authentic string quartet, the first Haydn wrote expressly for London audiences and just one of several whose flying final movements are laced with an earthy, very un-courtly Hungarian folk influence. - Michael Dungan
