Irish Times writers review Ballet Freiburg Pretty Ugly + Freiburg Baroque Orchestra at the SFX, Louise Walsh Eckart Schwarz-Schulz the NSO/Gerhard Markson at the National Concert Hall and Studs at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.

BALLETT FREIBURG PRETTY UGLY + FREIBURG BAROQUE ORCHESTRA, SFX CITY THEATRE, DUBLIN

Baroque music has always been popular with choreographers, with its rhythmic drive, clear structure and sheer "danceability". Like many other composers of the period, Bach devoted a significant portion of his career to writing dance music or music based on dance forms. The Art of Fugue, however, comes from the other side of his output: heady and disciplined contrapuntal writing. Amanda Miller's choreography for The Art of Fugue displays its own heady discipline. Rather than slavishly following the different voices of the five members of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (ala Mark Morris), she creates her own linear strands of movement in counterpoint to the music.

The stage at the SFX is extended and the dancefloor is set diagonally, just off-centre. At the back of the stage, members of the audience sit on benches, and to the side are benches for the dancers to sit on. This configuration changes our perspective and makes it easier to follow movement canons facing in different directions that might be hidden by the usual flat audience/stage perspective. This informality, along with the casual blue costumes and white socks, eschews theatricality and allows us to focus on the movement. Dancers use the four corners of the space as bearings, with long phrases along the diagonals that quickly turn to the opposite corner. Distance and proximity are emphasised throughout, running and skidding into corners or working out tight canons in isolation.

Amanda Miller doesn't always need groups of dancers for these canons. Sometimes the one body seems to articulate different movement lines, one part of the body dancing in counterpoint to the other. Although the setting could seem cold and isolating, the movement is touching and human. Interaction becomes more tender in the second act, with lots of smiles and glances, but it's Miller's own ballet vocabulary that allows most warmth and celebration. Bodies can be off-centre and tilting, yet the phrasing is natural and the movement breathes. The piece ends abruptly and, as with Merce Cunningham's endings, the feeling is that although it has ended it could actually go on forever.

-Michael Seaver

LOUISE WALSH (SOPRANO), ECKART SCHWARZ-SCHULZ (CELLO), NSO/GERHARD MARKSON NATIONAL CONCERT HALL

In the three-way public pre-concert conversation about his Horizons programme with the National Symphony Orchestra on Tuesday, Donnacha Dennehy made clear how the burden of history had affected his first orchestral work. The prestige of orchestral commissions is high, but performances are hard to come by and, in Ireland at any rate, a late start with a professional orchestral performance is the norm.

Dennehy's new work, o, as well as his discussion of the issues involved, suggest that the experience of writing and hearing his earlier The Vandal was something of a shock to the system. That shock, it seems, did its work.

The new piece, a TCD commission in memory of Brian Boydell, is a strangely wavering, harp-impelled, somehow Stravinsky-esque machine, which expresses the playful pleasure in experiment and exploration that seems to mark Dennehy's work at its best. With the players redistributed on the platform (the two harps on opposite sides), the composer's sound world develops chattering, sliding, whistling textures that evolve at one stage into a slow, thick whirlpool, with a later moment that's like the chopping jaws of some giant industrial machine. It's a work I hope we hear again soon.

Severance, written for the Dutch ensemble, Orkest de Volharding, shows Dennehy's familiar fondness for the incongruous, intercutting a tape part that doesn't shy away from the tones you might hear from a mobile phone with heavy brasses and reeds in a way not unlike one of those destructive sculptures by Jean Tinguely.

Amsterdam-resident British composer Richard Ayres's No 30A is part of a "NONcerto" for orchestra, built on an inversion of the expectations engendered by the word "concerto". The upending or guying of musical conventions - high notes for the sake of high notes from the soprano (Louise Walsh), and grunts and growls as well as heavy scraping from the cellist (Eckart Schwarz-Schulz) - brought to mind images of a sort of surreal Lego building, with carefully pre-formed elements intentionally alienated from their normal function.

Ayres's work was interrupted by someone applauding after the sound had stopped but before the psychological end had been reached. There was an even earlier disruption to Cage's 4'33", in spite of conductor Gerhard Markson's self-consciously dramatised start of each of the three "movements" in this notorious statement about the impossibility of silence. Dennehy's Blips and Statics ("for multiple ghetto-blasters and public address system"), replacing the originally advertised Metastaseis by Xenakis, is a wry comment on the Cage piece.

Markson's conducting of the three orchestral works showed the meticulous care which is his hallmark in new music.

- Michael Dervan

STUDS, GAIETY THEATRE, DUBLIN

There is no critic whose dismissal is quite so devastating, whose endorsement is more meaningful, than Old Father Time. Paul Mercier's Studs has held its ground for 16 years now, and the current revival is further evidence of longevity to come.

The elements that made the original production a ground-breaker are still in evidence. It opens with a dazzling display of football mime, a set-piece that has spawned many imitators but has yet to be outshone. The language is appropriately basic and coarse, but is shot through with an odd lyricism. And the plot offers a sense of depth, of ordinary people who reach for the extraordinary in their lives and abilities.

Rovers is a bottom-of-the barrel football club, a joke even to itself, until a stranger appears one day seeking a job as manager. His meek self-introduction belies the tyranny he will wield, and his Svengali-like ability to transform his players into creatures of kamikaze conviction. They win, again and again, until they are at last in the final.

The changes in his players extend beyond the football pitch. One defies his supercilious boss, another sorts out an unfaithful wife, a loser with girls turns his situation around, and so on. They all grow in stature with their success on the field. Even if they lose, there is no going back to lives as acquiescent nonentities. When their inspirational idol is revealed to have feet of clay, it hardly matters.

It is all great fun, directed by the author with the added value of his deep understanding of the characters. There is some repetition in the second act, but it is received rather like a musical reprise with variations. A terrific cast, led by Liam Carney as the manager and including such stalwarts as Eanna MacLiam, David Gorry, Denis Conway and Les Martin, give a superb display both of acting and physical fitness.

They should all have their names carved on a cup.

- Gerry Colgan