The NME Brats tour steamed into town with its much touted rock superstars of tomorrow. Selecting four hyped hatchlings with a time-honoured sense of anti-authoritarianism, the music weekly sadly placed the most radical acts too early on the bill.
NME Brats/Carling Award Tour
The Ambassador
Despite the vitalising genre-hopping of sensational Liverpudlians The Coral, or the retro-rock earnestness of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, naturally it was the big, dumb, take-that-mum-and-dad rebellion of Linkin Park clones Lostprophets and Nü-Meatloaf Andrew WK that secured the night's raging horde.
The Coral cramped onstage to get things off to an early heave. Strutting robotically in the narrow gaps amid his six-piece, frontman James Skelly was an assured presence, his turbo-charged Suggs impression lending currency to Madness comparisons. Shadow's Fall veered recklessly between brooding atmospherics and ragtime interludes, while a sinewy set stomped to an all too hurried finish.
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club took the stage under the cover of darkness. Performing in smoky silhouette, their shadows loomed over such fuzz rock mantras as Love Burns, the hulking guitar sound of Red Eyes and Tears, and the purely exhilarating Whatever Happened to my Rock'n'Roll (Punk Song). Lostprophets could clearly boast the most fervent fan base. Obligatory devil horn salutes greeted the nü-metal screechers as guitar- crunching numbers Shinobi vs. Dragon Ninja and The Fake Sound of Progress blended into a frenetic, posturing din.
Finally, Andrew WK was all flying hair. The pent-up, brawny rock of last year's most celebrated nosebleed sufferer flung out directionless, encapsulated in the jerky, trapped-in-a-net spasms of Florida's metal man. Soiled pale denims and a skanky white T-shirt formed the time-warped uniform of the mainstream revolutionary. If his manifesto amounted to anything more than "we wanna have fun and we wanna get wasted", he could be dangerous. In the meantime, he did party pretty hard. - Peter Crawley
Maxim Vengerov (violin), Vag Papian (piano)
National Concert Hall
Sonata in B flat K454 .................................................. Mozart
Fantasy in C D934 ................................................... Schubert
Violin Sonata ............................................................ Strauss
Caprice viennois ....................................................... Kreisler
Schön Rosmarin ....................................................... Kreisler
Tambourin chinois .................................................... Kreisler
Maxim Vengerov is nothing if not full of surprises. You might expect that, from the above programme, which he played at the National Concert Hall on Sunday, the romantic virtuosity of the sonata by the young Richard Strauss or the warm schmaltz of the three Kreisler pieces might have suited him best. But, no. It was the restrained classicism of Mozart which made the strongest impression, the tone firm, the vibrato carefully controlled, the overall manner dignified and with a slight air of detachment.
That slight detachment lingered into Schubert's late Fantasy in C, a work full of perilous pitfalls, which seems to have an unfailing lure for virtuosos in search of vehicles with the name of a major composer attached. There's a lot of repetition in this music, and it needs to be approached with a richer vein of musical fantasy than Vengerov mustered on this occasion. The overall effect of Vengerov's finely-balanced playing was of étude-like diligence, everything in its allotted place, but no special spark of lyrical imagination, no hint of Schubertian flight to elevate the discourse consistently above the mundane.
Paradoxically, for a work in which the violinist usually takes top billing, the Schubert fantasy is a particularly tall order for the pianist, and the same imbalance of effort applied to Strauss's Sonata in E flat. Violin virtuosos usually like to travel with tame pianists, players who understand that their task is to carry out the bidding of their partner on stage rather than necessarily adhere to the exact effects the composer may have specified. Vag Papian is far from being the tamest pianist I've heard in this sort of context. He can play with forthright presence and real force. But in the Strauss, those moments were chosen to the violinist's rather than the music's advantage. This may be immature Strauss, but the musical argument of the outer movements is of a stronger weave, and the delicacy of the central improvisation of a more potent magic than Vengerov and Papian suggested on this occasion.
Vengerov, however much he appeared to be ad-libbing or tricking with the text, kept a very tight rein on the three pieces by Fritz Kreisler, genial creations by a man long treasured as one of the most warm-hearted of violinists and composers. But the Kreisler bon-bons warmed Vengerov up nicely for a generous selection of encores, mostly of Brahms's Hungarian Dances. Here, when he wasn't making a clear mockery of the music with over-the-top mannerisms and downright clowning, Vengerov showed his virtuosic art at its finest, sharp in concept and execution, and set to leave any audience on its feet and asking for more. - Michael Dervan
