Michael Dervan reviews La Cenerentola at the Gaiety Theatre and Brahams Piano Concerto No 2 performed by Bernd Glemser and the RTE NSO, while Davin O'Dwyer was less than impressed by US tweenie favourite Hilary Duff at the Point.
La Cenerentola, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
Like them or loathe them, competitions are an everyday part of musical life. There are very few musicians who get through their careers without entering a formal competitive arena of some sort, local, national or international. For opera directors, however, the situation is rather different.
Opera Ireland's participation in the European Opera Production Prize gave the US team of director and designer Thaddeus Strassberger and costume designer Mattie Ullrich a rare opportunity to emulate the kind of experience brought about by the list of engagements that's part and parcel of every important international music competition.
Given the unusual circumstances, it's hardly surprising that in Rossini's La Cenerentola the duo took the opportunity to deliver rather more than might have been expected for a production of a single opera. They opted for a kind of play within a play presentation, revealing layer after layer, rather on the lines of a Russian doll.
The overture became a condensed dumbshow of The Barber of Seville. La Cenerentola proper brought us onstage behind the just-dropped curtain of The Barber, with the ugly sisters as the stars and Angelina a lowly gofer. And from then on Strassberger and Ullrich crammed in their ever-shifting scenarios with the paciness of high-speed fast-forward on a DVD player.
It was a gag-rich, hit-and-miss affair, carried off with an inventive energy that seemed to say, don't mind if you don't like the current joke, it won't be long before the next one comes along. In short, it was just the sort of production to test the contention that Rossini's tunes were so good and the vitality of his invention so high that his works could "survive the crudest buffoonery and the most careless vocalism".
Fortunately, the vocalism of the German mezzo-soprano Luisa Islam-Ali-Zade's Angelina and Irish-American tenor Paul Austin Kelly's Don Ramiro was anything but careless.
The smoky-toned Islam-Ali-Zade was the cooler of the two, rather shy on charm and affection, but vocally secure and agile. Kelly had a princely generosity of manner, easy high notes, and a never-failing musicality which made his presence a pleasure from beginning to end. It's been a long time since Opera Ireland has fielded a tenor of such style and class.
Sam McElroy was suitably opportunistic as the valet Dandini who spends most of the opera living it up in disguise as his boss, and Eimear McNally and Sandra Oman hammed it up roughly as the ugly sisters, Clorinda and Tisbe. With pitching not always well-centred, the British baritone Eric Roberts was rather off form as the sisters' father, Don Magnifico. Italian bass Paolo Pecchioli was a pleasingly svelte Alidoro.
On Saturday, the chorus was having a rather rough night, and Laurent Wagner's conducting of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra was surprisingly coarse and unsympathetic. He was effective in driving the music forward, but the suggestions of Rossinian wit or finesse were all too rare. - Michael Dervan
Glemser, RTÉ NSO/Markson, NCH, Dublin
Brahms - Piano Concerto No 2 Symphony No 2
The abiding image of Brahms is of a portly, bearded, earnest German. But that's not exactly the kind of man he was to his friends. He liked a good joke, and gave an advance description of his Second Piano Concerto as a "tiny, tiny piano concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo". He also told a friend after a rehearsal of his new Second Symphony that "the orchestra here plays my new symphony with crepe bands on their sleeves because of its dirge-like effect, and it is to be printed with a black border too".
In reality, the concerto is one of the most relentlessly demanding in the standard repertoire. Alfred Brendel has written of its "unsurpassable pianistic perversions" (he mentioned them in the same context as the pianistic challenges of Stravinsky's Petrushka), and has argued that the music displays "a superfluity of notes". The Second Symphony, on the other hand, finds Brahms in relaxed mode, and parallels have often been drawn between the character relationships of Beethoven's Fifth and Pastoral Symphonies, and Brahms's First and Second.
The RTÉ NSO's current BrahmsFest paired the two works by Brahms at the NCH on Friday. German pianist Bernd Glemser is one of those players who gives the impression of being able to fly through the difficulties of the concerto without turning a hair. It was an exciting and impressive achievement, even if the rubato was often routine and there were few finer points to be savoured. The audience's response was enthusiastic enough to have suggested an encore, but Glemser declined the invitation.
The Second Symphony is a lot lighter in scoring than the First, and this allowed rather more of light and shade into the music-making than was apparent in Thursday's performance of the First Symphony.
The playing still often inhabited the kind of middle ground which is often Brahms's lot in performance, but there was a greater overall sense of vitality in the playing than in the opening concert. - Michael Dervan
Hilary Duff, The Point Theatre, Dublin
What looks like a rock concert, feels like a pantomime and sounds like an overproduced CD? A Hilary Duff concert, of course. Duff is one of those actress-stroke-singers who exist purely to drain money from weary parents by appealing to their very young daughters - the prized tween demographic.
Between her "Lizzie McGuire" TV show and her watered-down Avril Lavigne-style rock, Duff can easily pack the Point with shrieking, screaming girls wearing all the merchandise.
When Duff appeared, the shrieking was ear-shatteringly loud, and at a frequency only achievable by girls between the ages of six and 11.
Forget The Who or Mogwai, it's at a Hilary Duff concert you are likely to do permanent damage to your hearing. Even Duff was moved to say "Wow, you guys are loud".
The production itself was a little tame, lots of Kraftwerk-style green lasers and a big screen that actually wasn't a screen at all, just a load of flashing lights.
So for any tweenies further back than the seventh row, Duff was a mere speck on the stage. Of course, the lack of close-ups meant we couldn't tell if she was lip-syncing or not.
The rest of the band seemed to be living out their rock'n'roll dreams, oblivious to the fact that they're not in Aerosmith, or that the crowd would be equally delirious if Duff knocked out a few numbers on a xylophone.
Duff's performance skills weren't too apparent to the naked eye, either.
She wandered about the stage, arching her back on the high notes, raising her hands for the choruses, pointing to the crowd regularly. - Davin O'Dwyer
Karaoke is often performed with more passion.
