Irish Times' reviewers report from the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the World Fleadh in Ballybunion.

Kilkenny Arts Festival

The last two days of the Kilkenny Arts Festival featured four concerts by three very different groups of musicians. On Saturday evening, in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle, White Raven presented medieval songs from England, France and Spain, plus traditional Irish songs and ballads.

White Raven's clean, pure sound fits our wishful thinking in these turbulent times that things used to be simpler. With the air of a warm-hearted, soft-spoken matriarch, Cork-born soprano Kathleen Dineen led the singing and introduced the various items. Her vocal clarity was perfectly matched by her consorts, tenor Robert Getchell and baritone Raitis Grigalis.

With impeccable intonation, they sang arrangements of Irish songs in much the same way as medieval English songs, sacred or secular. A polished and engaging show!

Imagination was also on display in Friday night's concert at St Canice's Cathedral, when the European Baroque Orchestra played music by Telemann, Muffat, Handel, Vivaldi and Rameau.

The membership of this period-instrument orchestra is renewed annually; and this year there are 19 players from 14 countries. The identity of the EBO's sound depends on its remarkable director, Lars Ulrik Mortensen. He leads from the harpsichord with a vitality and eccentric physical demonstrativeness which could never leave anyone in doubt about expression or ensemble.

The quality of playing from strings and wind was consistently high, and dance movements, of which there were plenty in this programme, were delivered with a strong sense of rhythmic style.

Paradoxically, the ability to characterise became a limitation. The problem was not the persistent crescendos and decrescendos and flexibility of rhythm, even though they might horrify those who justly claim that Baroque music should be played with terraced dynamics and steady rhythm.

The problem was that there was too much change, too much flexibility; and this ironed out the differences between movements and even between the styles of composers. So this was a concert in which the sum of individual excellencies never quite created the impact one expected.

The Argento Chamber Ensemble from New York is a group of 13 accomplished players who are especially interested in music by the French spectralist composers.

Spectralism's unique contribution to contemporary music has been to develop ways of writing that depend on electronic analysis of the minute properties of sound. As the ensemble's director, Michel Galante, explained: the music's aesthetics are related to those of the French impressionists.

As Friday's lunchtime concert in St Canice's Cathedral showed, pieces written in this way tend to be self-conscious about the techniques used to manipulate sonority, and to depend less on sharp contrasts than on growing from their beginnings. Gérard Pesson's Cinq Chansons (1999) lies on the edges of these methods. However, they were very evident in the palindromic shapes of Galante's Leaves of Absence (1995), in the fascinating sequences of . . . à mesure . . . (1997) by Philippe Hurel and, above all, in Éthers (1978), by one of spectralism's founding fathers, Tristan Murail.

However, all these works were trumped by the subtle focus and astonishing, extreme sonorities of Périodes (1974), from another founding father, Gérard Grisey. This remarkable piece was played in Saturday night's concert, also in St Canice's.

The opening work in this final concert was Steve Reich's New York Counterpoint. Ireland's Carol McGonnell, the Argento's clarinettist, gave a scintillating account of this famous piece, full of combative tension between pre-recorded and live sound.

The last work in the festival was a rarity - the chamber arrangement that Erwin Stein made in 1921, at Schoenberg's request, of Mahler's Symphony No. 4. Scored for five strings, three woodwinds, two percussion players, piano and harmonium, it is full of surprises that go far beyond such obvious points as a prominent horn solo being taken by clarinet.

The Argentos are not so much a blended ensemble as a group of highly co-ordinated individuals whose personalities interact productively.

I can imagine a tidier performance than this one; and under Michel Galante's direction the first movement seemed even more sectional than it usually does. However, the slow movement was riveting, and in the Finale Aylish Tynan's beautifully varied singing of the soprano solo was sensitively balanced with the instruments. Its innocent intensity and wide-eyed wonder felt just right for Mahler's idea - a child's vision of heaven.

To this pair of ears, which as they get older tend to admire Mahler's music more and more, and like it less, Stein's arrangement was a revelation.

It highlights the subtlety of part-writing. It ties the composer and his music into the Viennese tradition of large chamber works, from Schubert's Octet to Schoenberg's chamber symphonies.

The performance succeeded in every way that really matters. It seized the moment and persuaded one that if Kilkenny Arts Festival wanted to end at the top, it could not get much higher than this.

- Martin Adams

The World Fleadh

"The verse is in Irish and the chorus is in Japanese". Séamus Begley kicked off the weekend programme of the first World Fleadh on the Atlantic stage not long after midday on Saturday; and, as he admitted himself, it was about 12 hours too early to be singing a song.

Any cynicism that greeted news of the packed roster for this year's most-talked-about trad event was bludgeoned into submission by a string of blistering live performances from Solas, Capercaille, La Bottine Souriante and Kíla, and an unfettered enthusiasm from audiences who snaked all the way from the Castle Green to Ballybunion's spanking new Tinteán Theatre on the outskirts of the town.

The World Fleadh's greatest success, apart from its envious artist roster, was in attracting an eclectic mix of punters to Ballybunion's countless staging posts.

From the formality of the Tinteán Theatre, host to competitions, to Capercaille's stately performance on Friday night, and to the ultimate test of any festival, the impromptu sessions that brewed in local pubs, the collective temperature spiked around midnight on Friday when Beoga, a young quartet of fine musicians, jostled for space in the festival club alongside members of Lúnasa and Capercaille.

Far from Kerry's tourist epicentres of Killarney and Dingle, blistering live performances were delivered by the Michael McGoldrick Band and the Alison Brown Band on the town's two focal points, the Atlantic stage and the Town stage.

Some of the earlier weekend performers on the Atlantic stage experienced the harsh realities that Irish people (the bulk of the smaller-than-anticipated audience was home-grown) are loathe to pay to hear Irish traditional music, no matter how blistering, when they can catch superb sessions in any of the local bars throughout the week-long festival.

Still, by the time headliners the Sharon Shannon Band took to the outdoor Atlantic stage on Saturday night, the audience had swelled to an estimated 2,000, with about another 300 loitering outside the gate.

Shannon treads a fine line between twee, crowd-pleasing melody lines and unquestionably virtuoso playing, and her artistic generosity is laudable, with her band's ranks now swollen to include saxophonist Ritchie Buckley and banjo/fiddle master Gerry O'Connor.

The dubious contribution of Inishbofin late bloomer Dessie O'Halloran, with Say You Love Me , is one of Shannon's shrewdest commercial decisions, even if it dilutes the quality of the music unmercifully.

This was a heady debut for a festival which promises to return next summer, and with a bolder programme - if such is indeed possible.

- Siobhán Long.