Irish Times writers review a selection of events
Bruce Springsteen. Point Depot, Friday
The Seeger Sessions is everything a great session band should be: powered by ensemble playing and sufficiently ragged-edged to let each player shimmy and slide, with a collective ear trained on the ultimate prize: constantly evolving incarnations of every song.
Bruce brought his wagon train to town last May and the faithful came to pay their respects, with barely a few weeks of prior exposure to the raggle-taggle mayhem of his latest CD.
With the benefit of six months' exposure to this new repertoire, 8,500 punters came not to just listen, but to worship at the church of Bruce the redeemer. And chances are, we'd return every week, if our preacher was so inclined.
With a stage set that owed much to the velveteen romance of The Band's The Last Waltz, the 17-strong band rollicked headlong through a set that swung from a startlingly unexpected opener, Atlantic City, hurtling through a raucous and murderous John Henry and onwards through the belly of the beast that is Jesse James. The band shows all the best signs of the road. Arrangements are infinitely tighter (but still partial to a whole lot of improvisation), the magnificent brass quartet of tuba, trombone, trumpet and sax weaves intricate patterns through that straight-as-a-dye Springsteen guitar line, and Sister Soozie Tyrrell's and Sam Bardfield's sinuous fiddles lend a structure to it all, aided and abetted by Greg Liszt's mountainy banjo.
Patti Scialfa sidled up alongside the main man with noticeable ease, and Art Baron on tuba cut a particularly-apt Dr John-like figure, just in case anybody missed the Big Easy references that dotted the landscape. Springsteen has an uncanny knack of keeping his finger firmly on the pulse.
He held a mirror up to the tangible depression that hangs like a cloud over much of urban America in these troubled times with a spellbinding take on When The Saints Go Marching In, and a poignant reading of My Oklahoma Home. He added a newly-minted trio of verses to How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? all the better to capture the horrors of New Orleans' wanton destruction, and harnessed the celebratory defiance of the Big Easy to lead a circuitous funeral procession through Pay Me My Money Down. This was the revival meeting we'd all been waiting for: our antidote to all troubles corporeal. And even if Bruce left jaws agape with an almost unrecognisable arrangement of Blinded By The Light, the most wizened cynic would have to admit that a ringmaster who can raise the roof with This Little Light Of Mine, (more usually the stuff of hokey Up With People gigs) has got to have something special.
This surely was folk music as it was meant to be: music by, of and for folk - delivered by the possessor of the most bodelicious booty in town. - Siobhán Long
Opera Ireland. Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
Puccini - La Bohéme
Opera Ireland's latest La Bohéme has its origins in a project at Maiano Prison in Italy. The presentation on the stage of the Gaiety further involved inmates from Mountjoy Prison, so that, with Michele Zualdi as a guide, the design and creation of sets and costumes was spread between prisoners in two countries.
The achievement of all concerned is that there is nothing onstage to give any hint of the production's remarkable gestation. Opera Ireland has in recent years shown an incautious habit of flying off at a tangent in productions of the best-known works of the opera repertoire. This time the director, Porzia Addabbo, treats the piece with consistent respect. Puccini is a man who troubled to register details as small as the fading of a flame in his score. Addabbo's production takes account of the little things as well as the broad strokes.
The opera is updated to the late 1970s, and the forwardly-placed set for the garret of Acts I and IV, with its long, sloped glass window, provides beneficial focus and projection for the young-looking cast.
The cast is a strong one. Andrea Giovannini handles the vocal heroics of Rodolfo with ease, and Fiorella Burato strikes a more tender note as Mimí.
There's not a weak link in the core group of friends, with Paolo Pecchioli a particularly impressive Colline, and Massimo Cavalletti appearing to be the audience favourite on the basis of the opening night's applause. Alessia Grimaldi comfortably covers the gamut of the flighty Musetta.
The forthright style is epitomised in Alexander Anissimov's conducting, forceful in thrust, responsive in detail, especially as regards texture and colouring, but never sentimentalised.
Also tonight, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, tel: 01-8721122.
Michael Dervan
